_print/_doprnt; curses on sys III

[Dave Sherman]

In article <1101 at wateng.UUCP> ksbszabo at wateng.UUCP (Kevin S. B. Szabo) writes:
~| Dave, I'm sorry but I and many others (I hope), don't agree. The program
~| implementation is worse that unportable, it is unmaintainable. Sure,
~| the author can maintain it and will probably continue to keep it humming
~| perfectly on many systems. But if he/she ever leaves and someone has to
~| a) fix the code because of an internal, supposedly transparent change to stdio;
~| or b) port the code to a machine with a totally reworked stdio; the 
~| maintainer will have to spend many unecessary hours trying to find all the
~| hidden dependancies on an undocumented internal system routine. Besides, two
~| lines of code is a small price to pay for clarity, portability and
~| *maintainability*.

Two points:

1. Good documentation will avoid the portability problems. I am clearly
documenting in my code exactly what the v7-stdio dependency is.

2. "two lines of code is a small price to pay..."? Not when two lines
would have to be used for every printf in a source file which has a
lot of printfs, escpecially during the development phase.

Dave Sherman
-- 
 {allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsrgv!dave