Is there a standard prototype for `execvp'?

[Doug Gwyn]

Submitted-by: gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)

In article <17501 at cs.utexas.edu> rfg at lupine.uucp (Ron Guilmette) writes:
>Are they "POSIX-conformant" with respect to the qualifiers used to
>declare the types of their formals?

Since "POSIX" did not specify the qualifiers, a conforming implementation
need not provide them in any prototypes in the standard/POSIX headers.
If the implementor wants to be "helpful", he could through judicious use
of "const*" improve the compile-time error checking, but that is not
required.  In a related note in another newsgroup I observe that
"const*const*" is not only not helpful, it is actually harmful and
should not be used in place of "**" in such prototypes.

Basically P1003 didn't have enough qualified people-time to revise the
1003.1 draft to convert it to give genuine prototypes.  However, I would
recommends that all future C bindings do so; it's much cleaner than the
hybrid "UNIX man page SYNOPSIS" format that has been traditionally used.

Volume-Number: Volume 22, Number 94