Re: Limitations of standard C, formal interfaces, and other musings. Was: ms-level timings

[Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>]

> One thing to keep in mind is that the C standard differentiates 
> between a "hosted" and a "freestanding" implementation.  You can stil 
> be compliant C and lack things like stdio, etc.  It's effectively just 
> the language and some predefined symbols at that point.  I'm not sure 
> if Lua would run in such an environment, but I don't see why it 
> couldn't.

Our current approach is to make the core freestanding, moving all
"hosted" needs to the libs. I think the available 5.1w already
fits that but for a single use of "sprintf" (which is not required
by freestanding implementations) to convert numbers to strings.
(It is easy to change that through a macro, as long as you have
another function to do the job.)

The libs, on the other hand, make full use of "hosted" support.

-- Roberto