char *strcat(), *strcpy(), *fgets();

[John Myers]

In article <2029 at pt.cs.cmu.edu> jgk at speech2.cs.cmu.edu (Joe Keane) writes:
>To be useful, strcpy and strcat should return the end of the new
>string.

While returning the end of the new string would be more useful than
the current specification, returning the first argumen *is* actually
useful.  One of my standard macros goes something like:

#define SAVESTR(s) (strcpy(malloc(strlen(s)+1),(s)))

The semantics of strcpy(), etc. have already been cast in stone--
changing them now would break current correctly-written programs.
X3J11 is not in the business of making gratuitous incompatible changes
to C.  Perhaps gratuitous or incompatible, but not both.

>[...]  I already have a function like this, i just
>don't call it strcpy.

...which is of course the right thing to do.
-- 
_.John G. Myers		Internet: John.Myers at cs.cmu.edu
			LoseNet:  ...!seismo!inhp4!wiscvm.wisc.edu!k!nobody
"The world is full of bozos.  Some of them even have PhD's in Computer Science"