Re: BUFSIZ

[Sam S. <sd...@gn...>]

> * Daniel Jour <qna...@tz...> [2016-08-31 13:57:12 +0200]:
>
>> BUFSIZ is a pretty standard constant for all string buffers.
>
> Eh, can you support that? It's a standard constant for STREAM
> buffers. This is even defined by the C (C99) standard. Using it for
> anything that's not directly related to a stream thus seems wrong to
> me.
>
> The only thing that might be interpreted as "standard for [..] string
> buffers" is this quote from the glibc documentation:
>
>> Sometimes people also use BUFSIZ as the allocation size of buffers
>> used for related purposes, such as strings used to receive a line of
>> input with fgets (see Character Input). There is no particular
>> reason to use BUFSIZ for this instead of any other integer, except
>> that it might lead to doing I/O in chunks of an efficient size.

yes, this is precisely what I was talking about.

> Though this too does not specify whether BUFSIZ will be small enough
> to be put onto the stack. Moreover it's just in the documentation of a
> single libc, there might be systems that have a huge BUFSIZ but only
> provide limited stack space.

BUFSIZ is usually page size (4kB).

Given the amount of legacy code which does what glibc documentation
talks about, we are in a good company.

This is the same issue as /bin/pwd - if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Unless there is a commonly used clearly correct alternative approach,
the "char buffer[BUFSIZ];" is going to stay with us,
If it will ever be replaced, it will be a pervasive change throughout
the CLISP sources, not just the regexp module.


-- 
Sam Steingold (http://sds.podval.org/) on darwin Ns 10.3.1404
http://www.childpsy.net/ http://memri.org http://truepeace.org
http://honestreporting.com http://openvotingconsortium.org
People with a good taste are especially appreciated by cannibals.