Re: diffutils 2.8.1 ISO C90 compliance patch

[Dan Hipschman]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 12:11:08PM +1100, Paul Edwards wrote:
> The C90 standard exists precisely because there is no way to
> do it.  It is the common subset of all environments.  There's
> nowhere in the C90 standard that says how you can invoke an
> external program and capture the output.  You can't do it.  Not
> portably, and not on MVS.  You can however pass in parameters
> of filenames.

FWIW, a while ago I did some work on abstracting the diff functionality
into a diff library, but on a lower level than what diff3 would use.
However, the ultimate goal of the project was to provide diff as a
library so programs like diff3 and wdiff didn't have to exec diff, and
more importantly, programs like cvs and git didn't have to statically
link with older versions of the diff sources all in the name of
performance.  So I think diff3 could be written without using pipes this
way, but if we do it like that, it should be done right so everybody can
use the diff library.