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Date: Sun, 22 Oct 1995 16:41:03 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199510220641.QAA23370@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: jkh@time.cdrom.com, pst@shockwave.com
Subject: Re: SYSCALL IDEAS [Was: cvs commit: src/sys/kern sysv_msg.c sysv_sem.c sysv_shm.c]
Cc: CVS-commiters@freefall.freebsd.org, bde@freefall.freebsd.org,
        cvs-sys@freefall.freebsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org,
        swallace@ece.uci.edu
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>Just FYI, it's never been mine.  I routinely use structure
>initializers that only gcc grocks, and have even been known to do the
>occasional:

>	{
>		char foo[n];
>		..
>	}

>To do the job of alloca..  Not that I use the latter construct very
>often - I generally just use alloca directly, but the point is that if

/usr/src/usr.sbin/config/main.c:120: warning: ANSI C forbids variable-size array `tmp'

It's a nice feature, but it probably shouldn't be used without ifdefs in
a bootstrapping utility, and using ifdefs negates the advantage of having
it (you have to write ugly portable code _and_ ugly ifdefs _and_ code
using the feature instead of just ugly portable code).

Bruce