On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 01:15:51PM +0700, Ian Zagorskih wrote:
> On Friday 10 September 2004 12:59, cube@cubidou.net wrote:
> >
> > When POSIX says it is "implementation-defined", it means "if you use this,
> > you're beyond the limits of POSIX portability.  Good luck.".
> >
> > Failing on situations where portability is no more ensured is one way to
> > get people to writing portable code.
> >
> > Making NetBSD accept other syntaxes would not increase portability of the
> > application.  It would just be a hack to make it magically work on NetBSD.
> 
> Agree, it is nice when you take some application and it just works, no matter 
> what kind of magic was involved :) Though of course there should be a 
> reasonable balance between allowed flexibility and standard requirements.

You're missing the whole point of having a standard:  if your application had
followed it in the first place, it would have just worked under NetBSD, with
no magic involved.

You must understand that when an application does not follow the standard and
use implementation specific extensions (as this is the case here), it gives
up on portability.  This is the responsibility of the application programmer,
not the host OS.

Quentin Garnier.