[MPlayer-dev-eng] Correctly Printing FOURCCs

[D Richard Felker III]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2002 at 04:38:04PM +0100, Arpi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > >   printf ("fourcc: %.4s", (char *)&fourcc);
> > > prints the FOURCC backwards on big endian systems ('MARC' instead of
> > > 'CRAM', ' war' instead of 'raw '). I wanted to make a macro that will
> > > break it down into 4 printable chars, like so:
> > >   printf ("fourcc: %c%c%c%c", FOURCC_PRINTF_PARMS(fourcc));
> 
> ahh, and someone should test this with gcc 3.x first.
> as it handles printf as macro, weird things used to happen when we use
> tricky macros or #if together with printf :(

Then gcc 3.x is broken. Last I checked the C standard does not specify
that printf can be a macro.

Both gcc and glibc seem to have a lot of such brain damage (see the
string macros in bits/string.h) which breaks lots of perfectly
legitimate code such as prototypes for standard functions outside of
headers. IMO the correct approach is to complain repeatedly and loudly
to the idiots making this brain damaged stuff, so that it gets fixed,
rather that letting gcc/glibc turn into an even bigger mess of
standards abuse than it already is.

Rich