Ordering dependency between string.h and strings.h.

Rich Felker dalias at aerifal.cx
Sat Dec 23 17:17:46 UTC 2006


On Fri, Dec 22, 2006 at 11:37:23PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> On Friday 22 December 2006 7:53 pm, Rich Felker wrote:
> > Your reply is incorrect anyway, and please don't top-post.
> 
> *shrug*  I didn't see it.  He's in my spam filter.
> 
> > There is nothing wrong with including both strings.h and
> > string.h (except that you probably shouldn't be using the functions in
> > strings.h at all...).
> 
> I've used index() since Borland C for DOS, it's been here for the entire 
> history of Linux, and I'm going to continue to use it.  I don't care what a 
> standards committe says about it.  Standards bodies should document, not 
> legislate.  Gratuitously renaming existing interfaces is sad.

Standards bodies are there to document what's common to all systems,
not your two [or whatever number of] pet systems. As far as I know
there were two sets of functions for the same thing, present on
different systems, and the reasonably named one was chosen as the
standard one. Specifying many names for the same thing is not the job
of a standard; it's the job of abominations like perl.

Rich



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