Credits ======= The vast majority of PDCLib is original work by me. I felt it was the only way to ensure that the code was indeed free of third-party rights, and thus free to be released into the Public Domain. Another issue was that of coding style, quality and stability of the code, and the urge to really understand every miniscule part of the code as to be able to maintain it well once v1.0 has been released. That is not to say there are no credits to be given. To the contrary: Paul Edwards (author of the PDPCLIB), for inspirational code fragments, thanks. P.J. Plauger (author of "The Standard C Library"), for a book without which I would not have been able to create PDCLib at this quality, thanks. Paul Bourke (author of mathlib), for allowing me access to a complete math library under public domain terms so I could use it as a reference, thanks. Peter ("Candy") Bindels (netizen of osdev.org), who located a copy of Cody & Waite's "Software Manual for the Elementary Functions" for me and saved me serious cash in the process, thanks. Michael Moody, who contributed the generic implementation for to the Public Domain which can now be found in <_PDCLIB_config.h>, thanks. Rod Pemberton, for pointing out several flaws in early versions of PDCLib and giving other valuable hints, thanks. Brian Damgaard, for a very friendly exchange over the fine details of the Quicksort algorithm and its implementation in PDCLib, thanks. Rink Springer, for very precise bug reports including patches, and a heads-up on the capabilities of PDCLib when I most needed it, thanks. Everyone involved in the first, "public" attempt at PDCLib, for bearing with me when I restarted from scratch, thanks. Everyone bearing with me during the "stdio block", a period of many years in which PDCLib received not a single update because I was stuck and could not find the time and energy to work it out. Lennart Frid�n and Sammy Nordstr�m, who have been great pals even after I sunk some other project that had eaten countless hours of work between the three of us, thanks. My wife, daughter, and son for sharing husband and daddy with this strange machine, thanks. Style ===== I followed a set of guidelines in creating PDCLib. If you find some piece that does not adhere to them, that's a bug worth reporting. I mean it. I am a bit obsessive when it comes to coding style. ;-) - All the stuff that is not part of the standard specification is "hidden" in the _PDCLIB_* namespace - functions, variables, macros, files, directories. This is to make it easier to distinguish between what the standard dictates and what I added to make PDCLib work. - Any internal includes (i.e. those not specified by the standard) have their header guards defined in the *including* file, for a tiny bit of compile-time performance. - I always try to minimize the use of local variables. Wherever possible I used parameters passed by-value directly, and deferred declaration of locals to the innermost block of statements, in hopes that it might reduce memory footprint when the library is compiled with a compiler that is not that great at optimization. - Every function, every static data item that could possibly be shared, got its own implementation file. This means the library itself is probably larger than strictly necessary, and might take a couple of clock cycles longer to link, but it reduces size of object files and executables. - Where possible, I tried to share functionality between similar functions (as can be seen in the atoi() and strtol() function families). This means one or two additional function calls, but again reduces memory footprint and eases maintenance of the library. - Function arguments are named exactly as in the standard document. - The standard is taken quite literally in places. For example, the default implementations of memcpy() really copies char-wise. This runs contrary to earlier claims of performance, but is consistent with the *letter* of the standard, and you will probably use your compiler builtins (through a platform overlay) anyhow. - Every file has an Id tag, so that it is on file for *every* code file. - PDCLib code has no bias towards POSIX; indeed the absence of POSIX tidbits is one of its hallmarks. However, PDCLib also has no bias *against* POSIX, and when one platform abstraction is as good as another, I chose the POSIX one for sheer familiarity. (This is mainly referring to naming and parameter lists of OS "glue" functions.) - Identifiers are tersely named, but not cryptically abbreviated, and should be intuitive enough to allow easy understanding of PDCLib inner workings. - I disagree with the notion that good code needs no comments. Code tells you *how*, but not the *why*, and you have to figure out the *what* yourself. So I added comments to every nontrivial piece of code explaining my motives and hopefully keeping overly ambitious editors from repeating my mistakes. The header files especially should be self-documenting to the point of being a suitable replacement for any library reference book you might be using.