Re: encapsulating directory operations

"Keith Thompson" <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:87a570jpe6.fsf@nosuchdomain.example.com...

"Paul Edwards" <mutazilah@gmail.com> writes:
[...]

E.g. I can't drive an EBCDIC X3.64 terminal unless C90
provides an ESC define.

[...]
>
Of course you can.

I'm not disputing that it is physically possible.

You're misinterpreting my "can't". I was going to say "you
know what I mean", but maybe you don't.

You can just use '\x27' in your code.  It doesn't
have to be part of the language standard.  If you have an application
that, for whatever reason, needs to drive both ASCII and EBCDIC
terminals, you can configure it by any means you like to use
'\x1b' or '\x27` (command-line argument, environment variable,
configuration file, reply from the terminal, whatever).

Yes, I agree those are standards-conforming alternatives.

But not what I want. For reasons which are difficult for me
to elaborate - "aesthetic", or "self-contained" may or may
not be apt words - I want to include the ESCAPE in the
C code, just like the "hello, world\n" bit.

The C90 committee didn't force me to accept "\n" from a
config file, so that I could have CRLF on MSDOS.

The idea that you can't do that without a constant defined in your
language standard is just silly.

It may be silly from your perspective, but for me it is
crucial.

That's what C90 is all about after all - making things as
completely portable as possible.

>
No, that's not what C90 was ever about.  Very few C programs are
completely portable, because they don't need to be.

I dispute the "don't need to be".

And even if you insist that about everyone else, it doesn't
apply to me.

I want my programs to be "completely portable", meaning
"conform to hosted C90 rules" or "conform to hosted C90+
rules". Those are the only two choices.

Also - something else I didn't mention.

Even if I got my C90+ changes into a future C30 standard -
that's still not good enough. Whether it takes C40, or C50,
or C60000000 - one day I intend for it to align with C90+.

If that means invalidating 60 million years worth of C
development - so be it. You should have read comp.lang.c
in 2025. It was always an OOB question.

BFN. Paul.