Re: the Linux man-pages as an educational tool

On Mon, 3 Aug 2026, Alejandro Colomar wrote:

> > That's basically how it went with 'gets': The community realized it is a bad
> > function, then the implementors started to withdraw it.
> 
> Here's an interesting story about gets(3), which I learnt recently:
> The C Committee didn't remove it from ISO C.  It was the Austin Group
> that triggered some unusual process within ISO for overriding the
> C Committee, and removed it in a secret meeting.

That sounds like a myth.  You can easily read the October 2009 minutes 
(N1475), item 4.27 "On The Removal of gets() (N1420) (Stoughton)".  You 
can also see C99 issue 0332 that resulted in the obsolescence in C99 TC3 
that was followed by the removal in C11.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
[email protected]