Re: [PATCH 1/2] system_data_types.7: Document size_t

Florian Weimer
2020-09-18T17:27:29Z

* Alejandro Colomar:

> I think I prefer to leave it opaque, showing only the requirements
> that POSIX and C make.
>
> There's really not much gain (basically uint and ulong cover most of the
> possibilities; and still it's not a guarantee).
> And readers might write non-portable code because of reading that.

My idea was it that it stresses that you have to use %zu in order to be
portable. %lu works almost everywhere, so that's any easy mistake to
make because it still leads to -Werror build failures on s390 (31-bit).
Likewise for %ld for ptrdiff_t, it should be %td.

> On 2020-09-18 16:34, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> that the length modifier for printf and scanf is z, commently used as
>> %zu or %zx (%zd is for ssize_t).
>
> Good idea.
>
> Would you prefer that, or just refer to printf(3) in See also?.

I think it makes sense to spell out %zu and %zx explicitly.

Thanks,
Florian
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