To: J3                                                     J3/23-231r1
From: Lorri Menard
Subject: Reply to request for FLUSH (SYNC=
Date: 2023-October-24

#Reference: 23-231

Paper 23-231 is a request from PhD student Nathan T. Weeks
(weeks@iastate.edu) in the Department of Mathematics and Department of
Computer Science at Iowa State University.

His request is reasonable at its face value, to provide a way for a
programmer to be SURE that the call to FLUSH has, in fact, resulted in
the data being tranferred to the storage device.

The problem, however, is that there is no guarantee from the underlying
operating system that the FLUSH has happened.  For example, both MacOS
and Windows will return a SUCCESS status to the user before the data is
actually finished transferring.

While we thank Mr Weeks for his proposal, we decline it at this time.