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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!emba-news.uvm.edu!wollman From: wollman@UVM.EDU (Garrett Wollman) Subject: Re: Using gets() [ Was Re: nn ] Message-ID: <1993Jul26.215124.22345@emba.uvm.edu> Sender: news@emba.uvm.edu Organization: University of Vermont, EMBA Computer Facility References: <CAKu2r.10rt@austin.ibm.com> <CAq222.8E4@sugar.NeoSoft.COM> <22u6tmINN2t6@xs4all.hacktic.nl> <CAsEpH.55o@sugar.neosoft.com> Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1993 21:51:24 GMT Lines: 35 In article <CAsEpH.55o@sugar.neosoft.com>, Peter da Silva <peter@NeoSoft.com> wrote: (Hey, the new version of Trn automatically folds lines...) >Not entirely. I think gets() should be made non-functional unless you >make an explicit choice to pull it in. I just think that this breakage >should occur at compile time, not run time. If we eventually upgrade to the new GNU ld program, there is a .stabs directive that can be used to make the linker emit an error when linking a program that references a specific symbol. (Obviously Chris could not depend on this for his portable stdio, but it's a reasonable accomodation to make.) I don't think that this treatment should be made for other functions than gets(), although getwd() is another prime target. For example, think of what would happen if the same behavior were used for sprintf(). (``This program uses sprintf(), which is unsafe. Please bug its maintainer to use snprintf() instead.'') strtok(), while stateful and ugly and all that, is not actively dangerous to use, at least not until we have threads. One of the nice features of putting these routines in a separate library would be that programs such as metaconfig and autoconf would generate scripts that would not find these routines, and configure the programs not to use them. -GAWollman -- Garrett A. Wollman | Shashish is simple, it's discreet, it's brief. ... wollman@emba.uvm.edu | Shashish is the bonding of hearts in spite of distance. uvm-gen!wollman | It is a bond more powerful than absence. We like people UVM disagrees. | who like Shashish. - Claude McKenzie + Florent Vollant