Why doesn't cc -ansi disable conflicting type for getline from stdio.h?

[Kurt Hackenberg]

On 2021/06/14 17:10, Edward Sanford Sutton, III wrote:

>    Trying to work on properly learning C so following K&R second edition
> of C Programming Language. Found in manpage that -std=c89 or -ansi can
> be passed to setup a more compatible set of build rules which hid
> warnings about how main is defined.
>    My understanding is that this should also cause getline to not be
> defined in /usr/include/stdio.h. Is there a reason that "#if
> __POSIX_VISIBLE >= 200809" should trigger as true in there with
> -std=c89?
Huh. I didn't know about that function getline() as part of the C 
library. The latest C reference I have is for C99, 1999; it doesn't 
include getline().

You may have run across dueling standards or something. Posix defines a 
standard Unix, and apparently also defines a C standard library that's a 
little larger than the C standard library defined by the C standard, 
even though Posix doesn't define C. (Yes, that's a little weird.)

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_POSIX_library>

The boundary between C and Unix has always been blurred a little in 
practice. It's good to keep the boundary clear in your mind, but you 
might have to accept some imperfection in software.

I suggest you take that getline() thing as a glitch, the kind of thing 
that shows up in old software[1], and work around it without worrying 
about it too much. Definitely rename the function in the sample program.

As for learning C, K & R is the classic for that, but it's 30 years old. 
I suggest that you go through that, and when you more or less have a 
handle on the language, also look at more modern versions of C. There 
were significant changes in 1999 and 2011 -- not fundamental changes, 
but some useful additions.


[1] C and Unix are 50 years old! That's pretty damn old for software.