Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!snorkelwacker!spdcc!mirror!ima!haddock!karl
From: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Novic C programmer needs help
Message-ID: <15946@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Date: 15 Feb 90 01:27:31 GMT
References: <1153@psc90.UUCP+ <1990Feb12.201406.215@wam.umd.edu> <420@wattres.UUCP>
Reply-To: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer)
Organization: Interactive Systems, Cambridge, MA 02138-5302
Lines: 14

In article <420@wattres.UUCP> steve@wattres.UUCP (Steve Watt) writes:
>The entire piece of code, however, is *awful*!!!!!!  If there is a varargs
>package around, there tends to be a vsprintf around!  vsprintf is the very
>correct way of doing this sort of thing.  Depending on having _doprnt around
>is NOT NICE!

You are mistaken about the chronology.  <varargs.h> and _doprnt() date back to
V7, while the v*printf() family is a relatively recent invention (SVR2, I
think; 4.3BSD still doesn't have it except in SysV compatibility mode).  Any
printf-like code that was written within that window had to use _doprnt(), or
pass a fixed number of arguments to sprintf() directly, or reinvent the
printf() wheel from scratch.

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