4 ms·

That's interesting. Can you elaborate on why?

• wahern 6y ago
  The reason it doesn't work despite being syntactically correct is because the standard goes out of its way to declare that, despite appearances, buf still behaves as if declared as `char *buf`. Thus sizeof just evaluates to the size of a pointer. I think the original intent of the variably modified parameter syntax was merely to support optimization--a compiler could hypothetically prefetch n elements. Whether or why they didn't care to consider the potential security and robustness benefits of making the semantics behave like automatic storage VLAs, I have no idea. But over the years I've seen multiple proposals to rehabilitate the semantics.