Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!oberon!sdcrdcf!hplabs!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Variable argument lists.
Message-ID: <1006@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 22 May 88 05:10:29 GMT
References: <14139@brl-adm.ARPA> <504@sas.UUCP> <1777@rpp386.UUCP> <4824@ihlpf.ATT.COM>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 12

In article <4824@ihlpf.ATT.COM>, nevin1@ihlpf.ATT.COM (00704a-Liber) writes:
> As you have stated, *printf is used a lot.  For this reason alone, I want
> it to be as fast as possible.

The best way to do that would seem to be for the compiler to macro-expand
*printf() to a sequence of simple procedure calls (when it can, which is
when the format argument is a literal, as it usually is).  Now that ANSI C
defines *printf(), a compiler may safely do so.

[I cut my computational teeth on a B6700, where the Fortran and Algol
compilers handled formats at compile-time.  It came as an unpleasant
shock to me to find that the rest of the world still interpreted them.]