the Linux man-pages as an educational tool

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Joseph,

> Date: 2026-08-03 19:45:06+0000
> From: Joseph Myers <josmyers@redhat.com>
>
> On Mon, 3 Aug 2026, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> 
> > > That's basically how it went with 'gets': The community realized it is a bad
> > > function, then the implementors started to withdraw it.
> > 
> > Here's an interesting story about gets(3), which I learnt recently:
> > The C Committee didn't remove it from ISO C.  It was the Austin Group
> > that triggered some unusual process within ISO for overriding the
> > C Committee, and removed it in a secret meeting.
> 
> That sounds like a myth.  You can easily read the October 2009 minutes 
> (N1475), item 4.27 "On The Removal of gets() (N1420) (Stoughton)".  You 
> can also see C99 issue 0332 that resulted in the obsolescence in C99 TC3 
> that was followed by the removal in C11.

It could very well be a myth.  For the outsiders, it was the WG14
convenor who told us this story some days ago.


Cheers,
Alex

-- 
<https://www.alejandro-colomar.es>
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