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From: 6600pete@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Strings in C (Re: ambiguous ?)
Message-ID: <2756@hub.UUCP>
Date: 27 Oct 89 23:55:15 GMT
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In-reply-to: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL's message of 27 Oct 89 18:37:06 GMT

In article <11428@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes:
> In article <2742@hub.UUCP> pete@cavevax.ucsb.edu writes:
>>In article <2421@convex.UUCP> grogers@sushi.uucp (Geoffrey Rogers) writes:
>>> In article <6676@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>>>>In most Macintosh C compilers that I've seen, the syntax !"%p...."! is
>>Actually, the syntax is "\p...", but that's only a nit I had to pick.
> Oh, if THAT's the issue, then it's not a problem.  Any program containing
> a  string literal like "\pXXX" has stepped into the Twilight Zone of
> "undefined behavior"; the implementation is free to assign a "counted
> string" meaning to this if it happens to be useful to do so.

Ick. What a mess this makes. Oh well.

Actually, from previous articles I've just read, there is apparently a
"%p...", but I'm not quite sure why this is a bad thing as long as it is
documented correctly. I mean, on a non-Mac compiler, it's not going to
be caught anyway.

And odds are that you're not going to want to port a truly Mac-ish app
anywhere. The first page of Inside Macintosh, the Macker's Bible, says
"Everything you know is wrong..." Porting TO the Mac is conceivable;
most compilers have relatively extensive "UNIX compatibility" libraries.
But code FROM UNIX is not going to have a problem with "\p..." or
"%p..." either, is it? The SunOS 4 man pages don't say they use "%p..."
for anything (which of course is not the final word, but we're dealing
in percentage chances of conflicts, aren't we?)
--
  | GurgleKat (Pete Gontier), pete@cavevax.ucsb.edu
  | .UUCP reply addresses bounce; try another path.
  | ...if you'd gone to Dartmouth, you'd not have had to take the math.