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NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2015 14:09:04 -0500
From: Gareth Owen <gwowen@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Spurious diagnostic messages
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Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2015 20:09:04 +0100
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.c:66044

Keith Thompson <kst-u@mib.org> writes:

> I don't think "wrong" is the best word.  I do agree that having to
> specify the type of an object when printing its value is annoying.
> The problem is that avoiding that annoyance would require changes to
> the language, and it's not clear that the benefits of such changes
> would be worth the cost.

It'd be relatively easy to co-opt an unused format specifier as an
optional externsion (I'd pick "%?") to mean

"The compiler chooses based on the types of the varargs"

That'd be backwards compatible relatively easy to implement in compilers
that already do format-string <-> type checking.