On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Greg Hudson wrote:

: I was curious about this, so I looked it up in the Single Unix Spec.
: Such a format string is not legal; you have to use all of the
: arguments up to the highest one you use.

Which means you basically have to scan the string for whatever formatting
there is, cache a hash of pointers to each argument, _then_ format the
string.

Ugly, but it would work, and you could probably just as well hunt the string
for '$' following %[digit(s)] to see if you can avoid the special behavior
and speed printf back up.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)