S
spinoza1111
Although the Standard is biased towards Linux for commercial reasons
(the "free" status of Linux and the fact that it's virtual slave labor
making it irresistible to IBM) it is basically trying to say, not how
to "code standard C", but "what constitutes a standard compiler".
It is not intended to be read by such ordinary practiioners as
Heathfield, nor is a language standard, as such, to be used to beat on
ordinary programmers or text authors. And even though Seebach was on
the Standard, it isn't meant for him to use in his little campaign.
The passage that I quoted (and may I add that it seems to have cleared
up a lot of confusion and outright lying) was intended to recognize a
type of C program that would return something useful to its
environment as a function value, because many legacy command-line
processors expect this.
But were I to use C in practice, I'd use it to create
"DLLs" (windowsese for "dynamic linked libraries") called for critical
routines that must be called by an EXE (executable from the command
line or by double-clicking an icon). These DLLs would not contain a
main() procedure.
They would be "freestanding" not in the sense of floating on air like
Magritte's famous painting of a rock, but in the epistemological sense
that what they float upon is undefined. It could be a bare naked
machine but it does not have to be.
I suggest that the confusion in this newsgroup is either created by
deliberate economy with the truth, or lack of reading and cognitive
skills, or both.
You've said it before and you're going to say it a lot more before
we're done.