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At some point hitherto, Jerry Feldman hath spake thusly:
> I write C code according to the C standard.

Well, which one?  There are many C "standards" these days...  We have:

  XPG3
  ANSI C/ISO C89
  ISO C99
  IEEE 1003.1  (formerly POSIX.1)
  IEEE 1003.1b-1993
  IEEE 1003.1c-1995
  About a dozen other C-specific POSIX standard extensions
  SVID C specifications...
  BSD C specifications...

Sorta makes the old addage about standards ring true, eh? :)  I'd be
very surprised indeed if none of your code ever included any functions
defined by any of the later standards.  POSIX.1 has been around almost
as long as ISO C89, and most people don't even realize they're using
POSIX functions which aren't in the ANSI spec when they do so...

As for my macro trick, I have no idea if it is or is not a part of any
of these standards, as I've not a copy of any of them handy.  As I
mentioned, none of the texts I have on C mention it, but none of them
really go into any detail on the C preprocessor anyway, so that's
hardly a statement one way or the other...  Do the standards even
cover the behavior of the C preprocessor?  I've never seen one of the
specification documents; I have no idea.

> vfprintf(3) is a standard function available on all standard C
> implementations.

That may be true, but free implementations of vsnprintf() are easy
enough to obtain from either glibc or the free BSDs (depending on what
sort of license you need), and relying solely on vfprintf() makes it
much more difficult (if not impossible) to do things like log messages
with potentially variable numbers of components to syslog().  It's
also available on most modern implementations, so it's a good bet it's
available on whatever platform Frank is working on.

I've stated many times on this list that I'm a fan of portability, but
you also have to look at the practicality of the situation, and how
much extra time staying strictly portable will add to the task at
hand.  The ANSI C spec is very old and outdated, having been
originally conceived almost 20 years ago (work on it began in 1983,
though it was not finally approved until 1989), and with much
advancement having come between its aproval and now.  And in all
likelihood Frank isn't writing code that needs to be executable on
every platform from Multics to Solaris 9 and HP-UX 12...


- -- 
Derek Martin               ddm@pizzashack.org    
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