In article <3m7jrq$q2f@hermes.unt.edu>,
John Robert Williams <johnw@jove.acs.unt.edu> wrote:
>Why aren't there functions in the standard that don't have to exist, but
>must be implemented a certain way if they do?

 There are. There are two families of functions, one a subset
of the other. These are the functions required for hosted and non-hosted
implementations.

 Perhaps you can rephrase your question as: "Why doesn't the
(proposed) Standard provide a finer discrimination than this?"

 The best answer I can give is: it could but it would
take time and effort -- lets do it later, or, why not get togther a group
of people that want to do that and work on creating a
base document for subsequent standardisation?

 (Such groups exist in the ISO world, for example
the POSIX people like defining C headers).
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Why aren't there functions in the standard that don't have to exist, but
must be implemented a certain way if they do? The best example that I can
think of is getch(), which has a similar name on so many compilers only by
convention.

John Williams
johnw@jove.acs.unt.edu
"Life is case sensitive."