Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!kddlab!titcca!sragwa!wsgw!socslgw!diamond!diamond
From: diamond@diamond.csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: declaration of functions
Message-ID: <10358@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET>
Date: 14 Jun 89 03:04:41 GMT
References: <4400001@tdpvax> <14726@duke.cs.duke.edu> <13676@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Sender: news@csl.sony.JUNET
Reply-To: diamond@csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond)
Organization: Sony Computer Science Laboratory Inc., Tokyo, Japan
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In article <13676@haddock.ima.isc.com> The Walking Lint stumbles:

>... is one of the two contradictions in K&R1.$

>Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint

>$ The other is that variadic functions are not permitted, yet printf() exists.

This is not a contradiction.  The authors stated (correctly, since ANSI wasn't
yet the approved standard), that there was no portable way of implementing
printf() in C.  Most early (pre- final approval of ANSI) implementations of
printf() were either done portably in some other language such as assembly,
or done non-portably in C, or perhaps even non-portably in assembly.

I believe that the only internal contradictions in K&R-I relate to whether
an omitted storage class is equivalent to "extern" in certain cases, and to
the possible meanings of each of these cases.

--
Norman Diamond, Sony Computer Science Lab (diamond%csl.sony.co.jp@relay.cs.net)
 The above opinions are my own.  However, if you see this at Waterloo, Stanford,
 or Anterior, then their administrators must have approved of these opinions.