Novic C programmer needs help

[Karl Heuer]

In article <420 at wattres.UUCP> steve at wattres.UUCP (Steve Watt) writes:
>The entire piece of code, however, is *awful*!!!!!!  If there is a varargs
>package around, there tends to be a vsprintf around!  vsprintf is the very
>correct way of doing this sort of thing.  Depending on having _doprnt around
>is NOT NICE!

You are mistaken about the chronology.  <varargs.h> and _doprnt() date back to
V7, while the v*printf() family is a relatively recent invention (SVR2, I
think; 4.3BSD still doesn't have it except in SysV compatibility mode).  Any
printf-like code that was written within that window had to use _doprnt(), or
pass a fixed number of arguments to sprintf() directly, or reinvent the
printf() wheel from scratch.

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