_print/_doprnt; curses on sys III

[Steven M. Kramer]

When I was porting some programs/packages, I ran again the _doprnt()
problem in curses and other things.  I wasn't lucky enough to
	1) have it work OK, or
	2) have it exist.
What had happened was that 2 arguments in _doprnt (which was defined
in both UNIX systems I was working with) were reversed.  Since I never
expected this and had other porting problems at the time, it took
a long time to find this gem.

Now, the authors of each _doprnt had every right to do their own implementation
of what is essentially a part of printf.  There were no standards on _doprnt,
nor were there even any man pages on it or references to it (except this
has changed in 4.2).  ... and since there were no standards, it shouldn't
have been used except as a way to implement printf.

Maybe it's time in the next releases of UNIX to declare all support routines
in the UNIX support libraries as static so that external references like
that won't happen.
-- 
	--steve kramer
	{allegra,genrad,ihnp4,utzoo,philabs,uw-beaver}!linus!axiom!smk	(UUCP)
	linus!axiom!smk at mitre-bedford					(MIL)