[Python-Dev] test_builtin failing? or just 64-bit platforms

[Tim Peters]

> Hm, snprintf is *supposed* to truncate the result,

According to C99, yes, but MS has its own pre-C99 snprintf semantics, and
glibc has had at least two different versions.

> but it seems that here it refused to do anything.  Maybe PyOS_snprintf
> should be a wrapper that checks the return value of snprintf?

Check it for what?  We can't (at least not yet) count on uniform behavior
across platform snprintf implementations.

> I noticed that *none* of the recently checked-in PyOS_snprintf calls
> have their return value checked,

They were all derived (and most mindlessly) from existing sprintf calls that
didn't check either.  A goal of this transformation was to change as little
as possible.

> and I think it's better to leave it that way (since in many cases we
> really don't know what to do instead) -- maybe PyOS_snprintf should
> even return void (or does it already?).

The comments suggest it wants to return the C99-defined value (an int, < 0
for an encoding error, else the number of characters (excluding \0) written
if the size is big enough, else the number of characters that would have
been written (excluding \0) had size been big enough.  So the output was
converted in full iff the return value is non-negative and strictly less
than the size passed in.  That's fine by me, and I'll note that MS snprintf
meets that much too (if size isn't big enough, it returns a negative
result).  So perhaps in a debug build PyOS_snprintf could assert that the
returned value is non-negative and less than the passed-in size ...