sprintf/setlocale date back to at least C89, and probably even earlier - over three decades ago, this wasn't the performance and multithreading hazard it is tod

sprintf/setlocale date back to at least C89, and probably even earlier - over three decades ago, this wasn't the performance and multithreading hazard it is today, because people simply weren't multithreading. Global state was the practice de jure - even reasonably so, compared to drowning everything in a sea of redundant parameterization on monochrome 80x25 terminals, in an era of smaller programs, when global state was easier to reason about. The C89 standards committee wasn't "careless" here - it was a product of the times. Of course, when modern APIs and standards committees duplicate sprintf's issues, it's far more fustrating - even when justified in the light of "backwards compatability".