Talking about scanf (was Re: What's so bad about scanf anyway???)

[Larry Jones]

In article <960 at mwtech.UUCP>, martin at mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel) writes:
> BTW: Recently there occured a problem, to which I couldn't find an
> immediate solution. Take the following program fragment:
> 
> 	#define X 100
> 	char word[X+1]; int z;
> 
> 	scanf("%100[^:]:%d", word, &z);
> 	        ^^^----------------------- I'd rather want X here; still
> 	           better were `(sizeof word) - 1', so that I could ommit
> 	           the #define for X completly
> 
> What I could do is dynamically (at runtime) construct an appropriate
> format specification. But IMHO this more a work-around than an elegant
> solution to the problem.

Yes.  I never did understand why printf allowed "*" for run-time
specification of field width and precision, but scanf usurped "*"
for assignment suppression and so doesn't support run-time field
widths.

Any historians know how this came to be?
----
Larry Jones                         UUCP: uunet!sdrc!thor!scjones
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