Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!microsoft!jangr
From: jangr@microsoft.UUCP (Jan Gray)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Variable argument lists.
Message-ID: <1464@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 16 May 88 06:09:23 GMT
References: <14139@brl-adm.ARPA> <7864@alice.UUCP> <1740@rpp386.UUCP>
Reply-To: jangr@microsoft.UUCP (Jan Gray)
Organization: Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA
Lines: 18

In article <1740@rpp386.UUCP> jfh@rpp386.UUCP (The Beach Bum) writes:
>the addition of an extra instruction to stack the number of arguments
>can hardly be considered significantly slowing down a function call.

Right.  Slow down every function call ever, just so you can use your
nargs() function once in a blue moon.  On machines with fast function
calls (e.g. SPARC, which typically stacks no arguments), *any* extra work
is extremely significant.

Try
	char *cat(int nargs, ...);

	cat(6, "lets", "move", "on", "to", "something", "else");

"The addition of an extra parameter to specify the number of arguments can
hardly be considered significantly slowing down a function call."

Jan Gray   uunet!microsoft!jangr   Microsoft Corp., Redmond Wash.   206-882-8080