Re: encapsulating directory operations

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

"Keith Thompson" <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:87a575zvmb.fsf@nosuchdomain.example.com...
>

I can't think of any other way to control an ASCII/EBCDIC
ANSI X3.64 terminal without language/library support.

>
But there's no such thing.  I recall looking into this last time we
discussed this, and ANSI X3.64 is defined in terms of ASCII.

>
I didn't fully answer this either.
>
Yes, if you want to be pedantic, the ANSI X3.64 uses the
word ASCII, because they didn't spend any effort considering
that someone might want to do exactly the same thing on an
EBCDIC system - in the future - because there was no such
thing in existence at that time.
>
But if that committee had spent the effort to consider EBCDIC,
they probably would have reworded the language.

I believe that is unfounded speculation.  I'm nearly certain that
the designers of ANSI X3.64 were aware of EBCDIC.  We know that
they wrote a standard that depends on ASCII and not on EBCDIC.
I presume this was an entirely deliberate choice, not an unfortunate
oversight that they would have reconsidered if they had only taken
a moment to think about it.

But regardless - if you want to be really pedantic, forget about
ANSI X3.64 completely. I am creating a new standard called
non-ANSI X3.64, which allows either ASCII or EBCDIC,
so any reference to "ASCII" is replaced with "character set"
or any other term that means "ASCII or EBCDIC or maybe
even other things".

And you're free to do that, of course.  My personal opinion is
that defining a new standard based on ANSI X3.64 except that it
supports EBDIC is a waste of time.  I'm not aware that anyone other
than you wants such a thing or would use it if it were available.
But it's not my job to tell you how to spend your time and effort.

I do not believe this is difficult to understand.
>
I do not believe I have not made myself clear.
>
However, my perspective may be incorrect, and if you still
don't understand, it would be great if someone could
translate English to English.
>
I have this problem quite a lot. I don't know why - it's as
clear as day to me. Just like the C90 thing. Obviously I'm
not talking about inventing a time machine and/or sneaking
into the ISO office and changing all their existing copies
of C90 and then all the other copies everywhere in the
world, and all the derivatives too.
>
That is VERY OBVIOUS to me.
>
But for whatever reason, my casual use of "update C90"
is treated as if I am about to invent not just a time machine,
but coerce the existing members of the C90 committee to
do what I want.
>
Which is obviously ridiculous, so "clearly" not what I meant.
>
And the obvious alternative to the above, was obvious all
along. TO ME.

I'm sure it was obvious to you.  The problem is that you prioritize
a lot of things that most other people consider to be useless.
Your EBCDIC-based not-quite-ANSI-X3.64 "standard" is an example.

I'm *not* telling you not to do all this stuff.  If you want build
some large project that nobody else in the world needs or wants,
feel free.  Nobody asked for 139 different C implementations of
FizzBuzz, but I did that, just for the fun of it.

But if someone thinks that an EBCDIC-based terminal standard is
vital to the post-apocalytic future of humanity, it's not a big
stretch to think that the same person wants to make changes to the
C90 standard and have the modified document be recognized as "C90".

But you've now made it clear that that's *not" what you're doing,
so I'm not sure what you're still complaining about.  There was a
misunderstanding, and you've cleared it up.

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */