Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!aplcen!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Strings in C (Re: ambiguous ?)
Message-ID: <11438@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 28 Oct 89 05:40:42 GMT
References: <11398@smoke.BRL.MIL> <14115@lanl.gov> <2522@munnari.oz.au> <6676@ficc.uu.net> <2421@convex.UUCP> <2742@hub.UUCP> <11428@smoke.BRL.MIL> <2756@hub.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 11

In article <2756@hub.UUCP> pete@cavevax.ucsb.edu writes:
>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.

The problem is, a standard-conforming C compiler is obliged to
treat the %p format spec as meaning "take the void* argument
and print out a representation of the pointer, suitable for
debugging etc.", not to interpret the data at that address as
a counted ("Pascal") string.