[Gm2] Rant against ISO Libraries

[john o goyo]

Greetings:

As an exercise in using the ISO library, I wrote a wee hex-dumper.  It
works with the ISO-compliant compilers at my disposal: GPM on Linux
and Solaris, and XDS on Linux.  I thought that I would test it with
GM2 by defining those bits of the ISO library needed.  Herein lay my
tale of woe.

<rant>
Trying to define the ISO parts for a bit of simple I/O turned into a
headache ("The gasman cometh", if you recogize the reference).

Let me compare this with the saga of WG14.  They chose to break as
little existing code as possible.  They certainly made controversial
choices by deciding on the Unix library but at least they did not
break a lot of code.  In contrast, WG13 chose to create completely new
libraries so as to ensure that all existing code broke.
</rant>

The upshot being that I stopped.  #6-(

Sincerely,
john