Re: critique of gnulib - stdioext

[Bruno Haible]

Jonas Termansen wrote:
> It's been a while since I looked at the stdio-ext functions, although
> I'm not really sure why they need to exist. At least there is a way to
> satisfy gnulib.

These functions exist
  a) to enable important functionality that has been forgotten by the ISO C
     standards authors, e.g.
       - fseterr (why should a custom/extended printf implementation not be
         able to set the error indicator of a stream?)
       - fpending (needed when, at the end of a program, we want to flush
         stdout in a safe way, but without introducing unneeded system calls).
  b) as an optimization, so that e.g. GNU m4 does not need to copy the contents
     of the FILE buffers into its own buffers, but can already do searches
     for newlines and parentheses directly in the FILE buffers.

Bruno