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From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Is va_list defined by <stdio.h>?
Message-ID: <16863@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 5 Apr 91 21:47:08 GMT
Organization: Cygnus Support, Palo Alto
Lines: 26

In an ANSI C implementation, it appears that the type "va_list" must be
defined by <stdio.h> because it it used to declare the arguments for
vfprintf, vprintf, and vsprintf.  However, it is not in the list of
types declared by <stdio.h>, either in Appendix C.10 (page 192) or
in section 4.9.1 (page 125).

The sections that document these particular vXXX functions say, e.g.:

	#include <stdarg.h>
	#include <stdio.h>
	int vsprintf(char *s, const char *format, va_list arg);

but it is not possible for <stdio.h> to declare these functions without
also declaring va_list, since some people will include <stdio.h> without
including <stdarg.h>.  <stdio.h> could avoid declaring these functions
if <stdarg.h> was not also included, but the includes could occur in either
order, making things very messy, and I don't think that's what the standards
committee had in mind.

Is this a real omission, or am I missing something?
-- 
John Gilmore   {sun,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu   gnu@toad.com   gnu@cygnus.com
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