[Info-vax] C limitations, was: Re: VMS process communication

[Dan Cross]

In article <kam0vhFq0fdU11 at mid.individual.net>,
bill  <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>On 4/23/2023 3:38 PM, Dan Cross wrote:
>>> Don't know when it came
>>> about but I was already trying to port a lot of Univ C
>>> programs by 1982.  A bit before C89.
>>
>> That's very odd.  Was that some kind of micro?
>
>Typo.  Should have been just Unix C.  I was porting
>to Primos and Primix.

Got it.

>Mostly stuff from the comp.sources groups.  Very little of it was
>portable.  Even with a lot of massaging.  But the charset values
>was the biggest killer because so many programs assumed 0-127 as
>ordinal value of the ASCII charset.

I can believe that, but I'd imagine it was less the use of
individual code-points as a general assumption that the high-bit
was clear, and that thus one could use a char to index a table
with only 128 entries or something: things like that still trip
up programmers, even in our modern, almost always ASCII or
UTF-8, world (indeed, this used to be a source of frustration
for using the `is*` family, as they did table lookups: one had
to be careful to use `isascii` first before blinding applying
them).

Regardless, the ctype macros were there pretty early on; they
date from when C was still single-digit years old, and certainly
by the early 80s they were well established.

	- Dan C.