another argument against shared libraries

[Andrew Klossner]

Consider a program written for a 16-bit machine which uses
printf("%X",(long)a) to print a long.  This program might live into an
era in which printf is redesigned so that the correct arguments become
printf("%lx",(long)a), because "%X" has come to mean that upper case
letters are to be used in the hexadecimal numeral.

If this program had been constructed to use shared libraries,
dynamically loaded at runtime, then it would seem to "break", despite
the lack of changes to it.

This is not a case of exploiting a library bug.  What has happened is
that the library has evolved and the program has remained static.

  -- Andrew Klossner   (decvax!tektronix!tekecs!andrew)  [UUCP]
                       (andrew.tektronix at rand-relay)     [ARPA]