🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <xm2F5.47$xe3.691@burlma1-snr2>,
Barry Margolin  <barmar@genuity.net> wrote:
...
>Basically, K&R C had varargs.  The standardization committee designed
>stdargs as the replacement for it.  The main difference has to do with the
>fact that stdargs is designed to coexist with function prototypes, i.e. the
>funcname(<fixed args>,...) notation.

I can't quite parse your meaning here.  Are you saying that varargs did not
have the "at least one fixed arg" requirement?  If so, then that's what I
meant in the original post when I stated that it was my understanding that
varargs was more powerful (I.e., more powerful b/c it did not have this
requirement/limitation)

>>What I'd like to see is an implementation of the max() function that doesn't
>>require a 0 to be passed to signal the end of the list (and, consequently,
>>has the limitation that 0 can't be a valid data point).
>
>Neither varargs nor stdargs provides a way to find out how many arguments
>were passed.  If you don't want to pass a marker for the end of the list,
>pass the number of arguments as the first argument, e.g.
>
>max(5, 100, 0, -10, 150, 9)
>
>This also solves the problem of requiring at least one fixed argument for
>this function.

OK.  Point taken.

>>But thanks for the note about vprintf - this seems to imply that there
>>should be wrapper functions provided by the system for any "standard"
>>functions that take variable numbers of args.  I note that there is a
>>vscanf; are there any other standard functions that take variable numbers of
>>args?  (I can't think of any off hand, but I haven't tried very hard...)
>
>Are you asking about functions that take variable number of arguments, or
>functions like vprintf, that take an explicit va_list argument.

Functions like printf and scanf that take a variable number of args.  My
point, made also by another poster, is that a well designed "function that
takes variable numbers of args" will also come in the form of a companion
function that takes a va_list arg.

>I don't think there's a vscanf(), though (it's not on my Solaris 2.6
>system).

Present on Linux, but not on Solaris (AFAICT).