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From: James Kuyper <jameskuyper@alumni.caltech.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: encapsulating directory operations
Date: Tue, 20 May 2025 22:26:57 -0400
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"Paul Edwards" <mutazilah@gmail.com> writes:
....
> When C90 was being written - or indeed - when K&R was
> being written - if there hadn't been pressure to "bring to market",
> would you EXPECT a language standard - any language
> standard - but in this specific instance the ISO/IEC 9899:1990
> committee - to have included a standard form of directory
> manipulation.> As far as I know, there was never any LOGICAL barrier
> to including basic directory manipulation in C90.

There is a practical barrier - while C was developed in the context of
Unix, which had a lot of influence on the design of C, that design has
also always been motivated by a desire to, among other things, be as
widely portable as possible. There is a wide variety of different ways
to organize memory, and not all of those ways map well to a Unix-like
directory structure. The most different structure that I'm personally
familiar with is VMS, where the closest equivalent to a Unix directory
was versioned. If you specify a directory with a version number, you get
that version of that directory (if it exists); if you don't specify a
version, by default you get the latest version.
I'm sure there are more obscure cases that I'm not familiar with, and at
the time when K&R was being written, the variety was even larger. By
leaving directory handling up to OS routines, they avoided having to
design the relevant C library functions so they could be implemented
efficiently on that wide variety of platforms.