On Sat, 1 Aug 2026, Alejandro Colomar wrote: > That's 37 years. During these 37 years we have gathered a lot of > experience and data about this. And the conclusion is that it was > a huge mistake. Programmers have struggled to understand this, and
No, there's no such conclusion. Two functions, strncpy and strncat, are with hindsight confusing (but it's the names and semantics rather than the header that are confusing). I don't think there's any kind of community consensus at all that there's any problem with mem* being in <string.h>, or any functions other than those two. The committee writing C89 had to come up with a compromise between functions such as memcpy and strchr and functions such as bcopy and index. They chose to adopt memcpy and strchr, and chose to put them in <string.h>, and there's no evidence since then to suggest a problem with either choice. -- Joseph S. Myers [email protected]
