Summary

What to do about tasks that involve OS specific functions such as disk I/O or graphics.

Discussion

Just wondering: some tasks require some kind of system call. In C and assembly for instance, this means the syntax may vary greatly from system to system. Is it ok to give several solutions then? Examples: Create a file#C or Hello world/Graphical#C. I wrote a few things for DOS, OS/2 and Windows, and I have seen on several tasks that Linux and to a lesser extent Windows are frequent among answers. Is it ok to write things for DOS and OS/2? (or mainframes, but I have no access to that kind of machine) Woud they be considered too much obsolete, or too little known, or of no interest for the purpose of learning a language? (debatable, FreeDOS is maintained and so is ArcaOS, and there are stll many enthusiasts). I understand that if we allow every legacy system, things can quickly grow out of control, as there have been thousands of platforms, most of historical interest today. On the other hand, if we only allow POSIX/Windows, it seems very limited. Another obvious example of current "nonstandard" machine would be mainframes.

Of course, this shouldn't apply to tasks where the system call is only loosely related to the task: for instance, "print Fibonacci to screen" should probably not be shown for all kinds of screen I/O, as the task is mainly about Fibonacci. But for tasks which are specifically about a system feature, it seems sensible to show how it's done on lesser known systems.

Additionnally, for this kind of "system" task, for a given platform it's likely the answer will be similar in most languages, as it often involves some kind of system call available to most languages. This can be annoying - though this would not be the first time several answers on RC are similarly written: in some cases the same algorithm has been translated to dozens of languages.

Any thoughts on this?