[CC restored, since I think this is a point that others may have comments on]
Hi Stefan,
On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 1:23 PM, Stefan Puiu <stefan.puiu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>
> Small nit about your wcstombs example below:
>
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 3:24 PM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
> <mtk.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> [...]
>> ---8x------8x------8x------8x------8x------8x------8x------8x------8x---
> [...]
>> printf("Length of source string (excluding terminator):\n");
>> printf(" %ld bytes\n", (long) strlen(argv[2]));
>> printf(" %ld multibyte characters\n\n", (long) mbslen);
>
> Why not use %zu for mbslen and strlen(argv[2])? Both are size_t as far
> as I can tell. Then you wouldn't need the cast.
The 'z' specifier is a C99 invention as I recall, and it took a few
years before it became widespread. For example, it wasn't on Sun's
libc for Solaris 8, and reading some man pages suggests that it wasn't
there on Solaris 9 (released in 2002), though it was there by Solaris
10 (2005). Likewise, FreeBSD seems to have since it version 5 (2003).
So although glibc has had 'z' for a long time (at least as far back as
glibc 2.1 at the start of 1999, though I suspect a little earlier as
well), there were even a few years ago a lot of installed non-Linux
systems that didn't support it.
So, for portable code, I've tended to almost reflexively use
%ld+(long). Probably, the need to do that is less pressing now. There
are many fewer of those installed legacy systems these days. I'll
change that code for the mbstowcs() page to use %zu.
Thanks,
Michael
--
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/
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