Re: Environment variables

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <327A32A3.2DD0@itg-sepg.logicon.com>, David Shochat <shochat@itg-sepg.logicon.com> writes:
> This whole thread is making me rather sick. I was recently involved with
> an effort involving porting a good bit of Ada 83 code to Ada 95, in
> which the necessary conversion of X-windows code from "AXI Bindings" to
> "Intermetrics Bindings" was fairly massive and non-trivial.
> 
> My point is that things like reading environment variables should be
> standardized. On our project we have tried to stick to the POSIX
> packages (Forest for us -- the newer one wasn't available when we
> started) for Unix interface functions which aren't standardized in the
> RM.

Although some may be able to limit use of their projects to running in a
Posix environment, not every project can live with that constraint.  Aside
from Unix systems, most Posix environments are separate environments from
the native environment for a platform, and often there are requirements to
use X-windows outside the Posix environment.  The particular example of
"environment variables" does not make sense outside Posix/Unix, so those
who have been bitten once by a portability issue should consider future
porting requirements as well.

Larry Kilgallen