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Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: varargs in the world
Message-ID: <7344@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Nov-86 17:10:35 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.7344
Posted: Mon Nov 24 17:10:35 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 24-Nov-86 17:10:35 EST
References: <1538@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 14

> Are there any compilers/RTL's out there which do *not* support "varargs"?

If you look long and hard, you can probably find a few.  I got an M.Sc.
thesis out of the problems involved in compiling C for a Pascal-oriented
machine whose architecture insisted on knowing the total size of the
parameters passed to each function.  Note, *the* total size -- it had to
be the same for all calls.  The architecture did not provide the primitives
necessary for building your own calling sequence, either.  Apart from some
really horrible trickery with compiler and loader cooperating, the only
fix was new microcode.  That's what was eventually done to make C viable
on that thing; varargs was only the beginning of its problems.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry