"Clive D.W. Feather" wrote on 1998-10-08 19:25 UTC:
This is not the right standard for a delay function; that's a much more OS-specific operation and belongs in an OS standard like POSIX.
Just the same as "kbhit()" doesn't belong in the C Standard.
The distinction of what belongs into a programming language standard and what belongs into an OS standard is generally pretty arbitrary and based mostly on historic accidents. Some languages (Java and Ada come to mind) for instance say that concurrency (multi-threading) and scheduling belong into the programming language standard, while others (C, Fortran, Pascal) leave this to OS API standards such as POSIX and Win32. In Ada, delay is even a reserved keyword (like return) and not just a library function (mostly because delay can not only be used as a statement of its own but also to timelimit alternatives in select statements). C does contain numerous functions that do block on external events (getchar()), and it does contain a clock interface, so I see no convincing argument of not also including a function that would allow one to block on a clock. For me, a delay function is just another form of accessing a clock, something very similar to reading a clock. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK email: mkuhn at acm.org, home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>