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

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

"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."

But none of POSIX, Spec 1170, nor X/Open have official validatoin suites
and testing procedures as far as I know, 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). X/Open is not even
a standard as far as I know.

Perhaps you use standard in a lose informal sense.

I am quite aware that the behavior of read in Linux is ANSI compliant
(dspite your memory, I never claimed otherwise). I just noted that this
is incompatible with most traditional impleemntations and causes 
portability problems.

I find this all quite odd. There is no standard for Unix, so ohw could
there possibly be formal validation procedures. POSIX has nothing to
do with Unix (you can have Unix without POSIX -- there are many examples,
and POSIX without Unix -- e.g. as in NT, despite your claims about NT,
NT is in fact petty well Posix compliant, and will pass the posix test
suite as far as I know [that test suite as far as I know still has not
been adopted as an official test suite by NIST, but perhaps I am out
of date, if so please inform)

I actually know ANSI C very well, but I do not find this knowledge
as useful as the Microsoft book on C runtime routines which shows
compatibilities between various systems. There are things in ANSI
which you cannot use safely and portably, and there are things you
can use saetly and portably that are not in ANSI. This will change
over time, but that is my experience to date.

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.

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