Hi Joseph, > Date: 2026-07-31 22:16:14+0000 > From: Joseph Myers <[email protected]> > > 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).
Those are the most misused, indeed. > 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. But it's a consistent solution that keeps all existing functions (thus, not a breaking change), and puts them in a header file that is appropriate (and which has been their header since 1986). > 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, This was a good choice. mem*() were more portable back then. > and chose to put them in > <string.h>, This wasn't a good choice. They were already in <memory.h> in existing systems. > and there's no evidence since then to suggest a problem with > either choice. We disagree. Cheers, Alex -- <https://www.alejandro-colomar.es>
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