@(#)ansi.doc 5.1 91/06/26
.lh

Oliver Smoot
CEBMA
311 First St. NW
Suite 500
Washington, D.C. 20001

Mr. Smoot: .pp My name is Keith Bostic, and I work for the University of California, at Berkeley. I recently spoke with Ms. Barra, of the X3 Secretariat, about the possibility of Berkeley's including portions of the X3J11 standard in our documentation, and she referred me to you. .pp We would like to use portions of the standard as follows: we (and all UNIX vendors) provide both on-line and hardcopy documentation of the C library functions supplied with the system. ANSI will be standardizing a small subset of these commands. As vendors become conformant, they will be faced with two types of changes. Some functions may be created from current functions and documentation, by adding new arguments, or modifying current behaviors, while others will have to be written from scratch. As this standard is, in many ways, a rigorous specification of the current UNIX manual pages, it will be a much simpler task to become conformant if vendors can use portions of the standard to create their usual style of documentation. This use is in no way intended to replace the standard itself, and my guess is that no more than twenty percent of the overall standard would be reproduced. .pp The example that I've included is the ``fgets'' function. This is probably a fairly reasonable example, and indicative of the type of use that Berkeley would make of the C standard. .pp There are two major advantages to the user community in allowing vendors to draw from the C standard. First, the manual pages are much more likely to be error-free if they are taken from the exhaustively checked standard. This is not a trivial point; if nothing else, the creation of the C standard has proven the difficulty of rigorously defining the syntax of complex functions! Secondly, there is no reason for manual pages to differ greatly if vendors start with the same text. This means that users will see equivalent documentation on a number of vendor's systems. This is particularly true in Berkeley's case; since we freely allow redistribution of our documentation, vendors that derive their systems from ours will, in all likelihood, deliver our documents as theirs. .pp Finally, I believe that it does not disadvantage you to allow this use of the standard. ANSI cannot provide manual entries for vendors to include, as each vendor must modify these entries in various ways, some of them fairly extensive. Also, each vendor, depending on the programs they wish users to use for displaying their documentation, will require the manual pages to be stored in a different format. .pp If I can answer any further questions, or clarify anything I've said, please don't hesitate to contact me. My phone number is 415-642-8524.

Keith Bostic



cc: Lynn Barra
 X3 Secretariat