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

[David Given <dg@...>]

Brian Hook wrote:
> 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.

I don't know if it's relevant, but the embedded system I'm using Lua on 
has some interesting properties that are causing me problems: in 
particular, no globals --- but the stdin, stdout and stderr symbols are 
reserved and cannot be overridden.

This basically means that lbaselib.c and liolib.c don't compile. I've 
had to patch the source code to remove the references to the above 
symbols. This was annoying.

If you want a piece of C code to work *anywhere*, the list of 
assumptions you can make is scarily small...

(Would the patch be of any use to anyone?)

--
[insert interesting .sig here]