Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!ames!amdahl!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: #defines with variable # arguments
Message-ID: <973@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 14 May 88 09:04:16 GMT
References: <2855@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Distribution: na
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 11

In article <2855@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>, lgy@pupthy2.PRINCETON.EDU (Larry Yaffe) writes:
>     Does anyone know why the folks at Berkeley chose to have their
> sprintf return its first argument, instead of the number of characters
> printed?  I can't think of any good reason for this choice, since it
> throws away valuable information (the # of characters printed) which
> is painful to reacquire.

Berkeley left sprintf() as they found it; that's what it did in V7.
There is an argument in favour of it: it makes it more like strcpy().
[Not that I think much of it, I've never found the return value of
 strcpy() useful.]  What's so painful about calling strlen()?