Xref: utzoo comp.lang.c:9484 comp.sys.ibm.pc:14649
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!linus!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: cdecl keyword ( re: C Decl ... )
Message-ID: <2820@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: 18 Apr 88 21:34:47 GMT
References: <1238@wjvax.UUCP> <297@ho7cad.ATT.COM> <1242@wjvax.UUCP> <121@csanta.UUCP> <146@obie.UUCP>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Organization: Ashton-Tate Corporation, East Hartford Development Center
Lines: 26

In article <146@obie.UUCP> wes@obie.UUCP (Barnacle Wes) writes:
>So why should we force these MS-DOSisms on the rest of the C-speaking
>world?  ...  If your programming environment needs them, let
>them be (non-portable) extensions to the standard needed to support
>your operating system!

That's exactly what they are!  I didn't hear anybody suggesting that they be
standardized; the question that brought about the whole discussion was how
to use them in the MS-DOS environment.

It is true that, with the (proposed) ANSI standard, one could define a
calling convention for C on the 8086 which was as efficient as the Pascal
standard: namely, callee pops arguments for fixed argument list functions,
and caller pops for variadic functions.  But the C calling convention for
the machine antedates the ANSI standard; and with K&R C, the calling program
does not know whether a function is variadic.  Thus, there are good reasons
for providing the pascal convention as a compilation default; and this
necessitates a cdecl keyword.

(Yes, one *could* redefine the calling interface.  This would invalidate a
lot of existing code -- assembler routines are quite common in 8086
products.)
-- 

Frank Adams                           ihnp4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Ashton-Tate          52 Oakland Ave North         E. Hartford, CT 06108