gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore) (09/14/85)
I've converted several C programs from having fixed buffers allocated at compile time, to malloc-ing their buffers at run time, and the change was almost always trivial, since you could turn a global array into a global pointer and change few if any other lines of source. This would be a pain in most other languages. I've done this to tar's tape block size at Sun and just did it to the terminal screen size in 2.10.3 vnews. *I think it's a great feature* although I wish they hadn't let you declare a function parameter as an array and then treated it as a pointer, since there definitely ARE differences. Maybe that can be a "commonly available extension" to the ANSI standard, rather than standardizing it that way?