Toshio Kuratomi <toshio(a)tiki-lounge.com>:
I've just been merging bugfixes and trying to clean up the code.
The
code is very old, only slightly less crufty than when I first looked at
it, and was first written with DOS in mind (I'm fixing a problem right
now in which int's were considered 16 bit so a long was used instead to
guarantee a 32 bit value... which breaks with 64bit longs.)
Historical background: when I, the maintainer before Toshio, first
looked at this code, it was 1987. The library had in fact been
written for DOS on 16-bit machines, and was coded in pre-ANSI C of an
...er...idiosyncratic style. I ported it to System V Unix; this was
five years before Linux was on the radar.
Trust me, if you think it looks crufty now, you *don't* want to know
what it looked like when I first saw it...
--
<a
href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>