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A comment on Torvalds: Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my butt every day.. Parent comment

Re:Torvalds: Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my but... by ldh on Saturday March 26, 2011 @12:51PM (#2372533)
I think there's an argument to be made that the way an API is implemented is an implicit contract that ought to be upheld.

That sounds wrong to me. If your consumers have to rely on assumptions beyond what's provided in the contract of the API, your API is leaky and/or broken.

[edit] I understand the pragmatism necessary in the case of the glibc issue, but to clarify my point I disagree with the general assertion I'm quoting.

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Re:Torvalds: Standards are paper. I use paper to wipe my but... by devinj on Saturday March 26, 2011 @12:57PM (#2372551)
Right, the memcpy() API is leaky because it leaves some things unspecified. You can deduce the implementation by providing various inputs to it that have "undefined behavior". This is a common problem in C, and there are usually functions that avoid it (Linus recommends memmove).
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