Variable argument lists.

[John F. Haugh II]

In article <7864 at alice.UUCP> ark at alice.UUCP writes:
>In article <14139 at brl-adm.ARPA>, bates%falcon.dnet%fermat at bru.mayo.edu writes:
> 
>>        Does anybody know (or care) why in ANSI standard C when 
>>        using a variable length argument list, there is no way to 
>>        determine how many arguments where passed into the function?
>
>Such a facility is hard to implement in some
>machine architectures without significantly slowing down
>every function call, even those that don't use it.

the addition of an extra instruction to stack the number of arguments
can hardly be considered significantly slowing down a function call.
this sounds like the anti-recursion argument IBM is so fond of - `but
stacking all those variables is SO expensive' ...

the addition of one more instruction (or two or three or whatever for
really deficient hardware) to provide such a useful function would
seem like A Good Thing.

- john.
-- 
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