Re: [9fans] APE printf difference

[Charles Forsyth <forsyth@terzarima.net>]

"... Furthermore, characters are intended to be transmitted as a block
to the host environment when ... input is requested on an unbuffered
stream, or input is requested on a line buffered stream ..."

that's true when a stream is established as _IONBF or _IOLBF,
so if you call setvbuf, that will be true.  the bit i quoted earlier dealt
with how the default i/o streams stdin/stdout/stderr were configured,
and that was not clear-cut, being conditional on whether the system
decided they were "interactive" or not, which seemed to be implementation-dependent
behaviour.  now, it might turn out to be straightforward to change APE to configure
the streams based on the guess made by isatty(), but that's why i asked
which way APE should face by default?  for import or export?
Trickey's short paper on APE touches on that, and i think an earlier
paper by Hume on Portability in the Research Unix environment was more
explicit.  in the past i relied on APE to check programs for good portability
when I developed on Plan 9 but supplied the programs to others to run on Unix, VMS and Windows.
perhaps now inward portability is more common, but should the older pedantry not be
available at all?