From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" Message-ID: <3AE9CA82.366A52A8@null.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <20010426210148.4FA2719A2B@mail.cse.psu.edu>, <20010427142424.A19571@honk.eecs.harvard.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] the declaration of main() Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 09:23:59 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 96abc486-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 "William K. Josephson" wrote: > ... I don't understand your unwillingness to accept that Plan 9 > as a research system need not support legacy code beyond what the > APE provides. I am aware of at least one other research system > that did try to be standards compliant and the result was that > those working on the project spent far more effort on engineering > than research. People can legitimately have different priorities. Sure, I haven't been disputing that. Actually Ken has already done the "engineering" for the standard C language aspect and Howard has already done the "engineering" for the standard C library aspect. But apart from that, all I ask is that the researchers avoid gratuitous incompatibility with the standard. For example, using the entry point name "mains" instead of "main" would not have entailed any noticeable amount of extra work. (Changing it now would involve some work. This is an example of the well-known fact that fixing problems earlier in the development cycle is much less expensive than fixing them later.)