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From: hascall@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (John Hascall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: best way to return (char *)
Message-ID: <1137@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu>
Date: 23 Jun 89 19:15:19 GMT
References: <7800013@gistdev> <894@cbnewsl.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: hascall@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu.UUCP (John Hascall)
Organization: Iowa State Univ. Computation Center
Lines: 29

In article <894@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> mpl@cbnewsl.ATT.COM (michael.p.lindner) writes:
>In article <7800013@gistdev>, joe@gistdev.UUCP writes:
>> Here is a question I haven't seen recently, and I'd like to get opinions from
>> the collective wisdom of the group.  Suppose I am writing a function that is
>> going to construct a character string, and is going to return a pointer to
>> that string.  What is the best way to do this so that your pointer is sure
>> to be valid when used?  I have seen several approaches to this problem:
 
>>     .	Have the routine allocate the buffer pointed to by the returned
>> 	(char *) as a static.
>AND
>>     .	Assume it's the caller's problem to strcpy() (or other such) from the
>> 	pointer before something else can use the space.
>if they need to.  I usually do this, where I can.
 
   Yuck.  Routines which are not re-entrant are IMHO a "bad thing".

   Too often you want to do some thing like:

	 foo( bar(3), bar(4) );

   and if bar uses static storage for its result you are scr*wed.

   Unfortunately, the solution looks a bit untidy:

	 for( bar(ptr1, 3), bar(ptr2, 4) );


 John Hascall  /  ISU Comp Center  /  Ames, IA