gripe: variable arg lists

[Gordon A. Moffett]

Robert Viduya (gatech!gitpyr!robert) writes:

> I'm not defending the author  of  the  program.   He  shouldn't  have  used
> _doprnt() [ for variable-length arglists ] as it is an internal
> function of the standard C library and there
> isn't any guarantee that it will be in some future revision of  the  OpSys.
> However,  if C had a standard method of supporting variable-length argument
> lists, he probably wouldn't have resorted to using _doprnt().
> 
> Anyway, put  this  message  down  as  another  reason  to  standardize  the
> language,  especially  the intentionally vague areas like variable-argument
> lists.

But is it necessary to tie this into the language?  Both System V and
BSD have varargs.h, does this not provide portable variable-arglist
functions?

(System V also provides a vprintf(3), which is used with varargs.h
 and works similarly to _doprnt()).
-- 
Gordon A. Moffett		...!{ihnp4,hplabs,amd,nsc}!amdahl!gam

37 22'50" N / 122 59'12" W	[ This is just me talking. ]