Var args: a warning

[Mike Edmonds]

I have seen some advocate using the following code:

foo(fmt,arg1,arg2,arg3,arg4,arg5,arg6,arg7,arg8,arg9)
char	*fmt;
int	arg1,arg2,arg3,arg4,arg5,arg6,arg7,arg8,arg9;
{
	/* code, of course */
}

This will work fine on a vax. But I ran into trouble with code like
this when porting dump to an 11/45 and 11/70. If one of your arguments
is a long, as in "foo("d is %ld\n", (long)d)" then you can run into
problems, because of course a long will take *two* of those "int"
spots you reserved. Which makes any arguments following a long all
pretty darn useless, unless you have a pretty specific routine that
knows the 4th argument will always be a long.

It will also confuse you when this happens to be part of your
error detection routine and you rely on accurate output for
debugging!

Rick Lindsley
richl at tektronix
...!tektronix!richl