Re: [boost] Re: environment variable access

From: Greg Colvin (gcolvin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-01-23 18:18:39

From: "Jason Stewart" <res0054p_at_[hidden]>
> ...
> Sorry, I looked it up in MSDN one time and it only speaks of _putenv and 
> says it is not ANSI. However, grepping in the header files shows it is 
> there. I did a (admitedly quick) search on the web for setenv and it looked 
> like it was posix but not ANSI.

Years ago Microsoft stuck a leading underscore on all the POSIX functions
in their library, apparently in the misguided belief that the ANSI standard
required this.  I don't recall whether they ever dropped the traditional
names, but they did stop documenting them.  What hurts the most is meeting
programmers who learned C from MS documentation, with no awareness that
there was read() long before there was _read().  I once wrote a script to
strip out all the useless leading underscores in the code of one such
shop, so that we could port the code to Unix.

A-grumpy-whining-old-timery- Greg

"When I was getting started I had to make my own card reader
from an old cigar box.  Cheap cigars too..."