FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

> From: Bob Kline [mailto:bkline AT rksystems.com]
> Sent: October 2, 2002 1:46 PM
> >
> > Not a few ANSI-standard functions have an underscore prepended to
> > them in Microsoft's implementation.  I've never seen their
> > rationale.
> 
> I assume it's just a question of lagging behind the standards 
> committees
> (vsnprintf wasn't in the original ANSI C standard, and it 
> probably still
> isn't part of the standard C++ library).  I don't think 
> you'll find many
> vendors putting out documents with the word "rationale" in 
> their titles
> to explain why their products are out of date. :->}

Heh, no, guess not.  :-)

You're more generous than I am, it seems.  A leading underscore normally
indicates an internal not-normally-used function, and is a hint (or more) to
look for a higher level substitute.  But Microsoft's header files are
littered with AFAICT nonsensical nonstandardisms.  I can't even see how it
helps them, except to make porting code surreally difficult.  Which isn't
always in the plus column, anyway.  

Here's an example of the oddness, in stdio.h:

#ifdef  _POSIX_
_CRTIMP FILE * __cdecl fdopen(int, const char *);
#else
_CRTIMP FILE * __cdecl _fdopen(int, const char *);
#endif

It's hard for me to put a good face on that, not that I'm trying.  

Regards, 

--jkl


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