Re: Suggested method for returning a string from a C program?

On 20/03/2025 23:18, Keith Thompson wrote:

bart <bc@freeuk.com> writes:

On 20/03/2025 19:10, Keith Thompson wrote:

bart <bc@freeuk.com> writes:

[...]

stdint.h et al are just ungainly bolt-ons, not fully supported by the
language.

No, they're fully supported by the language.  They've been in the ISO
standard since 1999.

>
I don't think so. They are add-ons that could have been created in
user-code even prior to C99 (user-defined typedefs for 64 bits would
'need long long').

 Sure, they could; see Doug Gwyn's q8, for example.

Isn't that what I said? However I've just looked at this 700-line header:
  https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/q8/stdint.h
Sorry, but there's something wrong if you have to write all that to get a handful of fixed-width types. (And if this is for a multitude of targets, then there should be a dedicated header per target).
GCC's stdint.h is 200 lines. Mine is 75 lines. It these types were part of the core language, it would be zero lines.

All that's happened is that 'stdint.h' has been blessed.

 I.e., it was made part of the language, specifically the standard
library that's part of the language standard.  Which is what I said,
but for some reason you disagreed.

It's not tied into the core language which has char/short/int and controls integer width with 'longs', in denotations, suffixes and format specifier codes.

Yes, the format specifiers are a bit awkward.  Boo hoo.

They're a lot awkward. They're awkward enough for the built-in types, and it gets worse for the bolted-on types.