In message <200507311038.j6VAcG1N005696@vtn1.victoria.tc.ca>, John Nemeth write
s:
>     On every system with which I'm famailiar, library calls are
>regular functions and have no magic.  Admittedly, my experience is
>limited to general purpose computers for the most part.

Well, as an obvious example, some versions of the UnixWare compiler
translate strcpy calls into x86 string manipulation functions.  For an
even more interesting example, gcc can turn some trivial printf calls
into puts calls!

>     That's nice of it.  It's amazing what comittees can do; although,
>I'm sure there is a good reason for it.

I think it's a question of cost/benefit analysis; there's a huge cost to
trying to support access to such pointers on some machines, and no particular
reason for which anyone writing anything but an OS should care.  People
writing an OS are assumed to be their own implementation, and have the ability
to change the compiler.

-s