[ On Saturday, December 18, 1999 at 18:55:58 (-0500), Lord Isildur wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: 64bit issues
>
> POSIX is a plauge that has ruined many a UNIX. We have Berkeley, which is
> superior. Let the linux folks bog themselves down with POSIX bloat. 

These days "POSIX" and "bloat" are oxymorons!  (esp. w.r.t. 1003.1, but
even for the most part with 1003.2 and the rest; the only POSIX standard
that threatened major bloat was the grand "printing" standard that made
even LPRng look tiny).

One might consider "The Single Unix Specification, Version 2" to be a
bit bloated, I suppose, but it's always been a lot "better" than POSIX
in many respects too.

If you're an applications programmer trying to write portable
applications then all of these standards are an enormous comfort and
provide a long needed buffer zone over the base OS. (and indeed bare
4.4BSD is almost just as much of a nightmare of incompatibilities as
ancient junk like Xenix-V was! :-).  Luckily NetBSD really is mostly
POSIX compatible (if not actually compliant! ;-).  It's also much more
than bare POSIX too, thankfully.

(I ported a fairly large application with some pretty low-level systems
stuff to almost every unix-like system on the planet in the early 90s,
as well as porting many freeware tools including perl to most of those
systems at the same time.)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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