rebuilding fixincludes - good news, bad news and RFE

[korbb at egcs dot cygnus dot com]

Reply-To: ddsinc09@ix.netcom.com

Bad news first.

The new fixincludes cannot be rebuilt on all platforms
because AutoGen will not run on the DEC Alpha, probably
among others.

The reason is that all sprintf functions require that you
know the number of arguments at compile time.  AutoGen
does not know this at compile time.  It is data dependent
and computed at run time.  Solaris, SVR4, SVR5, WinNT and
Linux are implemented in such a way that passing the address
of a list of values works for the va_arg.  This does not
work on DEC Alpha.

The good news.

I have a total re-implementation of sprintf that uses
an argv style list of arguments to the format.  That will
work on the DEC Alpha.  It will be about 1 week before it
is fully integrated into and tested with AutoGen.
(Thank you Gary.)

The request for enhancement.

Please provide a collection of macros such that va_arg
procedures can be called with allocated argument lists.
There _are_ cases where people want to call such procedures
when the argument list is not known at compile time.
It is more than a little bit extreme that it was necessary
for a re-implementation of printf, IMNSHO.