From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" Message-ID: <3EBB29D8.7030200@null.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <3EB9E853.7040405@null.net>, <4bb7193815221f5e70d7548882f9109a@vitanuova.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] same functions everywhere Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 08:36:06 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: a5a7f688-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 rog@vitanuova.com wrote: > it's a perfectly good kind of data - EOF is only out of band if one > doesn't consider "not EOF" to be part of the normal getc return value. Well, I don't want to get into a debate about that; suffice it to say that "get next character" is, to me, a function that cannot be performed when there is no next character, thus something out of the ordinary has to occur, and making it occur in the data channel constitutes, to me, an in-band signal. Note that this design causes very real problems for portable C programming, because when sizeof(char)== sizeof(int) it is very likely that all-one bits is a valid data value *as well as* the EOF marker, so the program has to perform an additional feof() test that would not be necessary if the two kinds of information had been kept separate.