A small design note... Many of the library functions defined in the 
source code modules in this directory handle errors from system calls 
and C library functions by simply terminating the process.  This 
isn't acceptable design for a "real world" suite of library functions;
I did things this way to keep the source code simpler and shorter.
A properly designed function should indicate an error to to its caller
using a status argument or some special function return value.
