Re: 80286 protected mode

On 09/10/2024 23:52, Stephen Fuld wrote:

On 10/9/2024 1:20 PM, David Brown wrote:

There are lots of parts of the standard C library that cannot be written completely in portable standard C.  (How would you write a function that handles files?  You need non-portable OS calls.)  That's why these things are in the standard library in the first place.

 I agree with everything you say up until the last sentence.  There are several languages, mostly older ones like Fortran and COBOL, where the file handling/I/O are defined portably within the language proper, not in a separate library.  It just moves the non-portable stuff from the library writer (as in C) to the compiler writer (as in Fortran, COBOL, etc.)
 

I meant that this is why these features have to be provided, rather than left for the user to implement themselves.  They could also have been provided in the language itself (as was done in many other languages) - the point is that you cannot write the file access functions in pure standard C.