Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!killer!pollux!dalsqnt!rpp386!jfh
From: jfh@rpp386.UUCP (John F. Haugh II)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Variable argument lists.
Summary: performance questions.
Message-ID: <1740@rpp386.UUCP>
Date: 14 May 88 05:31:29 GMT
References: <14139@brl-adm.ARPA> <7864@alice.UUCP>
Reply-To: jfh@rpp386.UUCP (The Beach Bum)
Organization: Big "D" Home for Wayward Hackers
Lines: 26

In article <7864@alice.UUCP> ark@alice.UUCP writes:
>In article <14139@brl-adm.ARPA>, bates%falcon.dnet%fermat@bru.mayo.edu writes:
> 
>>        Does anybody know (or care) why in ANSI standard C when 
>>        using a variable length argument list, there is no way to 
>>        determine how many arguments where passed into the function?
>
>Such a facility is hard to implement in some
>machine architectures without significantly slowing down
>every function call, even those that don't use it.

the addition of an extra instruction to stack the number of arguments
can hardly be considered significantly slowing down a function call.
this sounds like the anti-recursion argument IBM is so fond of - `but
stacking all those variables is SO expensive' ...

the addition of one more instruction (or two or three or whatever for
really deficient hardware) to provide such a useful function would
seem like A Good Thing.

- john.
-- 
John F. Haugh II                 | "You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want every
River Parishes Programming       | -thing.  The darkness that comes with every
UUCP:   ihnp4!killer!rpp386!jfh  | infinite fall and the shivering blaze of
DOMAIN: jfh@rpp386               | every step up ..." -- Rainer Maria Rilke