Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!pyramid!voder!apple!kanner
From: kanner@apple.UUCP (Herbert Kanner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Another thing broken in ANSI C
Message-ID: <7109@apple.UUCP>
Date: 24 Dec 87 19:16:01 GMT
References: <3726@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: kanner@apple.UUCP (Herbert Kanner)
Organization: Apple Computer Inc., Cupertino, USA
Lines: 28

In article <3726@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>Another thing that ANSI C disallows is ALL prior uses of functions
>with variable numbers of arguments.  All such functions must be declared
>and defined with ", ..." notation, which did not exist before ANSI C.
>
>However, most existing compilers will continue to accept the old way,
>"as an extension", or will go deaf from screaming customers.
>
>[The things I mentioned before can't be fixed, or are unlikely to be fixed,
>by common extensions to the standard.  Is that more what people were looking
>for?]
>-- 
>{pyramid,ptsfa,amdahl,sun,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu			  gnu@toad.com
>  I forsee a day when there are two kinds of C compilers: standard ones and 
>  useful ones ... just like Pascal and Fortran.  Are we making progress yet?
>	-- ASC:GUTHERY%slb-test.csnet

Not quite.  Take printf for example.  True, it has to be defined with
the (format, ...) notation, but it is a library function and not your
problem.  Declarations of the form int printf(); are completely
acceptable; see Section 3.5.3.3, which states: "... an empty list in a
function declaratorthat is not part of a function definition specifies
that no information about the number or types of the parameters is
supplied."

-- 
Herb Kanner
Apple Computer, Inc.
{idi, ios, nsc}!apple!kanner