on the irresponsibility of pursuing C language reform (was: [PATCH 1/2] man/man3/{mem,strn}*(): SYNOPSIS, STANDARDS: Document these as provided by <memory.h>)

[Joseph Myers]

On Sat, 1 Aug 2026, Alejandro Colomar wrote:

> > When an API has been in <string.h> since 1989, that means documenting 
> > <string.h> as the main location for that API - not some other location one 
> > person thinks is better and that most of the community has never heard of.
> 
> FWIW, the APIs have been in <memory.h> since 1986 in 4.3BSD, and in
> System V they go back further to 1983.

In other words, they were in that header for 6 years, and it's been 
implicitly obsolescent by virtue of the standard choice for the 37 years 
since then.

Standards involve accepting agreed compromises that might not have been 
your first choice, rather than endlessly relitigating past disputes 
without new evidence or changed circumstances.  In this case, the choice 
of where to put the functions in C89 was an agreed compromise that 
implicitly obsoleted the previous location, and should have put an end to 
any arguments that <string.h> was a bad location for those functions in 
the absence of clear new evidence.  We have plenty of clear evidence for 
confusion about strn*; we don't about mem*.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
josmyers@redhat.com