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From: edward@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Edward Wang)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: OK, so why _does_ ld resolve text against data?
Message-ID: <38448@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 27 Aug 90 01:41:54 GMT
References: <37909@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <930@eplunix.UUCP> <3274@skye.ed.ac.uk> <13658@smoke.BRL.MIL>
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Reply-To: edward@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Edward Wang)
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In article <13658@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>In article <3274@skye.ed.ac.uk> richard@aiai.UUCP (Richard Tobin) writes:
>>   On the other hand, it can be useful to be able to replace a library
>>   routine and have other library routines use your version.
>
>I absolutely do not recommend this.  Implementations of the system
>library may well have internal constraints that the application
>programmer is unaware of, and replacing a library function can result
>in obscure, sometimes subtle, malfunctions.

However it is an essential feature of C.  Redefining library functions
is a time-honored C tradition.  Many things depend on it, for example
Ben Zorn's memory profiler that was so well received at Usenix a few
years ago.

I don't recommend doing this lightly either.  In Lisp, it's possible
to redefine car and cdr, but getting it to work is harder.