"Jonathan Turkanis" <technews@kangaroologic.com> wrote in message news:d1v087$6r0$1@sea.gmane.org...
Hi All,
Is there a reason to avoid providing a uniform interface to implementation-defined standard library features?
One of the most often heard complaints about the standard iostreams library is that there is no portable way to seek within a file stream using large (64-bit) offsets.
I really want to see this fixed in the standard library. Any interest in getting a proposal together? It seems to me the first step is to fix the <cstdio> stuff inherited from the C library. An easy way to do that is to propose the addition of fseeko and ftello functions. They are already provided on Solaris, FreeBSD, HP-UX, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and HP/Compaq/DEC Alpha OSF/1. SGI IRIX offers the same functionality, but named fseek64() and ftell64(). Apparently Linux is the only weak spot in the POSIX world. The functionality is trivial to provide under modern flavors of Windows. (Thanks to Nelson Beebe for survey of POSIX practice.) I haven't given much thought to changes that would be required for iostreams yet. --Beman