Re: strnlen, strict ansi, newlib vs glibc

[Craig Howland <howland at LGSInnovations dot com>]

On 08/15/2014 05:46 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > > > + strlwr() and strupr(). No idea where those originated.
> > > These ill-advised functions, which apparently predate any multibyte
> > > concernes are actually in newlib.  They are ASCII only, non-standard,
> > > and inherently broken by design.  So the question is, do we really want
> > > to export them?  If so, maybe we should guard them with something like
> > >
> > >    #ifdef __USE_NONSTD
> > That does not appear anywhere in the source. I hate to add a new guard.
> > They are wrapped in !defined(__STRICT_ANSI__).
> OTOH, this makes them visible in all circumstances but -ansi.
> I think we would really like to make them only visible if somebody
> really wants newlib extensions.
>
> So what if we define _NEWLIB_SOURCE and __NEWLIB_VISIBLE for stuff
> which is really newlib-only and not in any standard nor a Glibc
> extension?
If these really are ill-advised functions of unknown origins that are best 
wanted to go away, perhaps it should be something more like 
_BACKWARD_COMPATIBILITY_ONLY, or _NEWLIB_DEPRECATED (strlwr() more so thatn 
strupr()).  That is, these appear to be a special sub-set of Newlib extension.
Of course, the bad part about an idea like _NEWLIB_DEPRECATED is that a 
configure option would need to be added for it.  But the good part is that it 
would provide an easy mechanism to hide some dead wood that's being kept purely 
for backwards compatibility purposes.
Craig