Re: ANSI C and POSIX (was Re: C/C++ knocks the crap out of Ada)

[karish@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Chuck Karish)]

In article <dewar.828757752@schonberg>, Robert Dewar <dewar@cs.nyu.edu> wrote:
>"You know, POSIX, Spec 1170, X/Open, that kind of stuff.  POSIX is the one the
>US govt. will not use Win NT because of, because it doesn't match the spec
>they've selected."

Incorrect premise: Windows NT does conform to POSIX.1 and the
US Government does buy it as a FIPS 151-2 conforming system.

>But none of POSIX, Spec 1170, nor X/Open have official validatoin suites
>and testing procedures as far as I know,

Then you don't know very much about standards conformance certification.
The US Department of Commerce has an official test suite for FIPS 151-2
conformance that is a good indicator of POSIX.1-1990 conformance.

X/Open has test suites that cover POSIX.1 and most of the UNIX extensions
to it that make up SPEC 1170.  This set of tests make up the official
indicators of conformance to the XPG4 UNIX profile, which is what
Spec 1170 describes.

>and certainly very few Unix
>implemntations are 100% compliant with POSIX (very few versions of Unix
>even claim to support Draft 10 of Posix threads).

Claims of POSIX conformance are supportable when one makes the
reasonable next step of specifying which POSIX standards one is
referring to.  I know of at least two UNIX implementations that
support POSIX.1c threads.

>X/Open is not even a standard as far as I know.

X/Open is a corporation.  XPG4 is a specification that has all the
properties of a standard except ownership by a quasi-governmental
organization.

>I find this all quite odd. There is no standard for Unix, so ohw could
>there possibly be formal validation procedures.

XPG4 is a standard for UNIX.  The owner of XPG4 spells out
the formal validation procedures.  Check them out on their
web site:

             http://www.xopen.co.uk/public/test

>Anyway, can someone who really knows the score here tell us:
>
>Which of Unix, Posix, Spec 1170, X/Open have approved national and/or
>international standards.

If you include privately-controlled standards bodies (X/Open),
all of them.

>Of this subset, which have official validation procedure run by NIST
>or some other similar body?

With the same proviso, all of them.  Of the many POSIX standards, only
POSIX.1-1990 and POSIX.2-1992 have usable validation test suites.
--

    Chuck Karish          karish@mindcraft.com
    (415) 323-9000 x117   karish@pangea.stanford.edu