declaration of functions

[Norman Diamond]

In article <13676 at haddock.ima.isc.com> The Walking Lint stumbles:

>... is one of the two contradictions in K&R1.$

>Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl at haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint

>$ The other is that variadic functions are not permitted, yet printf() exists.

This is not a contradiction.  The authors stated (correctly, since ANSI wasn't
yet the approved standard), that there was no portable way of implementing
printf() in C.  Most early (pre- final approval of ANSI) implementations of
printf() were either done portably in some other language such as assembly,
or done non-portably in C, or perhaps even non-portably in assembly.

I believe that the only internal contradictions in K&R-I relate to whether
an omitted storage class is equivalent to "extern" in certain cases, and to
the possible meanings of each of these cases.

--
Norman Diamond, Sony Computer Science Lab (diamond%csl.sony.co.jp at relay.cs.net)
 The above opinions are my own.  However, if you see this at Waterloo, Stanford,
 or Anterior, then their administrators must have approved of these opinions.