Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!necntc!ima!haddock!karl
From: karl@haddock.ISC.COM (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Variable argument lists.
Message-ID: <3984@haddock.ISC.COM>
Date: 13 May 88 18:23:51 GMT
References: <14139@brl-adm.ARPA> <3569@ece-csc.UUCP> <3080@teklds.TEK.COM> <300@teletron.UUCP>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston
Lines: 14

In article <300@teletron.UUCP> andrew@teletron.UUCP (Andrew Scott) writes:
>In article <3080@teklds.TEK.COM>, daniels@teklds.TEK.COM (Scott Daniels) writes:
>>[C allows a function to be called with extra arguments, which are ignored]
>
>Is this true, or just a fluke thing that works under many C implementations?

It's a fluke.  (It doesn't always work, even in UNIX implementations.)  In
ANSI C, it's definitely illegal for nonvariadic functions, and explicitly
legal for the printf/scanf families.  The properties of <stdarg.h> seem to
imply that it would also be legal for any user-supplied variadic function.
That leaves non-standard vendor-supplied variadic functions, such as execl; my
guess is that it's the vendor's responsibility to document the domain.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint