tumble under BSD

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 2, 2016, at 5:09 PM, Mouse <mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG> wrote:
> 
>> It appears that the stdio that I'm linking against on OS X 10.9.5
>> does not keep the file pointers synchronized between the system and
>> stdio.
> 
> Actually, I would say that any supposedly-portable software that
> depends on either behaviour is broken; AFAICT stdio has never promised
> either way.
> ...
> I'd say it's about as important to know what is _promised_ as it is to
> know what _actually happens_.  This sort of thing is why.  

I wonder how clearly the various manpages state the promises.

It's unfortunate that lots of programmers have the habit of blaming the tool when their code breaks because they are doing "undefined" things.  There's a great paper about undefined things in C, and what compilers may do, and the way a number of well known open source projects react -- not by fixing the code but by turning off all manner of optimizations instead.

	paul