[TUHS] why the leading under score added to function names?

[random832 at fastmail.us]

On Sun, Feb 26, 2012, at 08:28, Ronald Natalie wrote:
> 
> WinMainCRTStartup isn't the replacement for main.

I never said it was. My point was that there is no "main" anywhere in a
program that starts with WinMain, whereas John Cowan claimed that a
"main" exists in such programs which does the things that
WinMainCRTStartup in fact does.

> main - for non-MFC console apps
> wmain - same thing but with wchar_t arguments (SOMETHING C/C++ standards
> hasn't ever addressed to my satisfaction).

I suspect this is partly because the unix world is a multibyte world,
and POSIX has "filenames don't have to be valid in any character set,
they're just bytes".

But Windows never had a satisfactory solution to multibyte vs wide in
pipes, either, anyway.

> WinMain - MFC main function

This existed long before MFC, I suspect.

> wWinMain - Ditto, with wchar_t
> 
> Actually the bulk of the CRT involves converting between the command line
> argument as a string and argc/argv (something UNIX does by the OS), and
> some gook necessary to support C++.

Well, not "by the OS" per se. More like, the OS only supports passing
argc/argv at any level, so the shell converts user-typed strings to
argv.

(A big gripe I have with the CRT is that its _spawn/_exec functions
don't quote strings containing spaces/etc so they can be round-tripped
by the CRT's argv initialization. And the argv code itself doesn't let
you have "wildcards in strings without quotes, literal stars in strings
with them", you have to choose between wildcards or not)

> The  fake UNIX environment (POSIX) (read/write/seek, etc...) actually is
> NOT initialized here, but when it is actually referenced.

mainCRTstartup does in fact call _ioinit() in the version I looked at. I
don't recall if WinMainCRTstartup does or not, it's not in front of me
now.
-- 
Random832