In article <40e6df2c@news.povray.org> , Wolfgang Wieser <wwi### [at] gmxde>  
wrote:

> I just verified that the code presented by you above will NOT work as you
> expect on:
>   Darwin-PPC (MacOS-X)
>   Linux-ix86
>   FreeBSD-ix86
>   NetBSD-ix86
>   Solaris-5.9-ix86
> (Nicolas: maybe I could run some checks for you on these boxes.
> I forgot that in my previous answer; but I doubt I can test cross-compiling
> using these.)

I assume you tried with a shell which was already pointed out as broken.
Then maybe you are just incompetent to run the test because on a FreeBSD
5.2-CURRENT as well as on Mac OS X 10.3.4 a simple program like

int main()
{
        return 12345;
}

will yield the correct result when executed by system().

> Okay, and if you read the man page you knew the exit code of system()
> is that of wait(2) or waitpid(2) which is a plain integer storing the
> exit code in the least significant byte accessible using
> WEXITSTATUS(status).

Well, given that a man-page is documentation of the state of the system you
have, not a specification, that is completely irrelevant for the correctness
of my statement.  ANSI/ISO C specifies the system function to return an
integer "int" and programs return an "int".  Neither wait nor waitpid are
part of ANSI/ISO C, they are some random Unix functions that ave nothing to
do with ANSI or ISO C.  Thus, any system that for whatever reason cannot
fulfill said specification of an international standard does not comply to
it.  It is of course nice that they document such a limitation.

As such, any such system cannot be expected to be fully supported by
POV-Ray.  Of course, that does by *no* means imply POV-Ray will not run on
such a system or that POV-Ray cannot be compiled on such a system.  The only
relevant point is that if you run on a system unable to support ANSI/ISO C,
you got the problem, not the POV-Team.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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