strtok (was: In defense of scanf)

[Steve Summit]

In article <824 at cbnewsl.ATT.COM>, mpl at cbnewsl.ATT.COM (michael.p.lindner) (I think) writes:
> Hope you never have to do anything complex.  If you call strtok on e string
> in the middle of a strtok of another string it trashes its state information
> on the first string (a little known feature), which can cause extremely
> elusive bugs.

This shouldn't be a "little known feature;" it is obvious from
the man page that strtok must keep private state, and the first
thing any good programmer should worry about when "private state"
is mentioned is "non-reentrancy" or "non-concurrency."

strtok is a horrid routine, precisely because of this aspect; I
can't believe SYSIII or SYSV (or wherever it originated) adopted
it, and then of course X3J11 had to go and further legitimize it.
(The rest of the "new" str* functions -- strspn, strpbrk, etc. --
aren't much better.  Can you say orthogonal?  "Orthghnpgtphl!"
Hmm, not very good.  The (r)index to str(r)chr change still
rankles, too.)

                                            Steve Summit
                                            scs at adam.pika.mit.edu