the Linux man-pages as an educational tool

[Bernd Petrovitsch]

Hi! all!

On 2026-08-15 15:03:14, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Aug 2026, Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:
[...]
>>>> Then why not have one official big header file for the whole standard?
>>>>
>>>> #include <stdlibc.h>
>>>
>>>    That wouldn't be too unreasonable nowadays I suppose, not IMHO anyway.
>>
>> The trivial counter example is windows.h (since ages). And at one point
>> "they" introduced the #define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN (probably) for a
>> reason ...
> 
>   I'm not sure what you refer to, is that Microsoft Windows?  How would it

Yes.

> be relevant to *nix libc?

Because M$FT choose the "you need only one #include for all header files"
strategy and implicitly admitted that it was not the best idea ....

>   Back in 1970s-80s when the C language standard was being shaped computers
> had memories in the range of kilobytes and storage was often floppy disks
> with all the performance implications, plus computing power in the low MHz

Above was more in the late 1980ies/1990ies with harddisks ...

> range.  Nowadays we have memory amounts in the high range of gigabytes to
> terabytes and storage that has throughput of gigabytes per second, and
> computing power many orders of magnitude better if you factor in not only
> the clock rate increase, but all the contemporary architectural features
> as well.  How could it not matter for the speed of header compilation?
And we may have "pre-compiled header files" though I never found (or more
stumbled upon) a serious page on "how to use them correctly and
efficiently" (though I'm not looking for that often).

LG,
	Bernd
-- 
Bernd Petrovitsch                  Email : bernd@petrovitsch.priv.at
      There is NO CLOUD, just other people's computers. - FSFE
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