Re: 5.1 RTL macros

[David Jones <drj@...>]

On Apr 05, 2006, at 12:27, Lisa Parratt wrote:

> D Burgess wrote:
> > ungetc() does not help.
>
> ARGH! NO! THE HORRORS!
>
> That gave me nightmares for weeks, that did. ungetc is a disgusting 
> abomination that shouldn't even exist, let alone be used.

It's often useful in lexing.  The functionality of ungetc will always 
be needed, and I think that's unavoidable.  So if it didn't exist then 
lots of programs would end up implementing their own version of 
Standard C IO streams, but with one byte of pushback.

I'm curious as to why you don't like it so much.  Is it buggy vendor 
implementations? Non-portable C code that relied on more than one byte 
of ungetc? Having to implement a C-like stream interface on top of an 
abstraction that didn't provide anything like ungetc? Or something 
else?

drj