> (1) When is it okay to use C99 code in the Python core? More particularly, > is it considered acceptable to use widely-implemented library functions that > are specified in C99 but not ANSI C, or widely-implemented features that > are new to C99?
[C99 is also ANSI C, IIUC. ANSI has adopted ISO/IEC 9899:1999 as a U.S. national standard.] It's ok to use functions of the C99 standard library if you have a configure test and a fall-back implementation, or if you know that the function is available on all systems we care about. > Or is C99 code now acceptable pretty much anywhere? No. As others have pointed out, Microsoft still hasn't implemented in Visual C. > If so, should > PEP 7 be updated? It currently says: """Use ANSI/ISO standard C > (the 1989 version of the standard).""" No. > (2) Is it okay to use the '%a' format specifier for sprintf, sscanf and > friends. > Are there major platforms where this isn't implemented? (Using > '%a' would make the issue implementation much simpler.) It's implemented in VS 2008, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hf4y5e3w.aspx On the other hand, people still might try to run Python on older versions of Solaris, such as Solaris 2.6 (which was released 1997). I don't know when Solaris' CRT first started to support this. I'd add a configure test, and, at run-time, raise an exception if the C library doesn't support it yet somebody tries to use it. Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
