The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6
IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition

2.1 Use and Implementation of Functions

Each of the following statements shall apply unless explicitly stated otherwise in the detailed descriptions that follow:


  2. Any function declared in a header may also be implemented as a macro defined in the header, so a function should not be declared explicitly if its header is included. Any macro definition of a function can be suppressed locally by enclosing the name of the function in parentheses, because the name is then not followed by the left parenthesis that indicates expansion of a macro function name. For the same syntactic reason, it is permitted to take the address of a function even if it is also defined as a macro. The use of the C-language #undef construct to remove any such macro definition shall also ensure that an actual function is referred to.

  3. Any invocation of a function that is implemented as a macro shall expand to code that evaluates each of its arguments exactly once, fully protected by parentheses where necessary, so it is generally safe to use arbitrary expressions as arguments. Likewise, those function-like macros described in the following sections may be invoked in an expression anywhere a function with a compatible return type could be called.

  4. Provided that a function can be declared without reference to any type defined in a header, it is also permissible to declare the function explicitly and use it without including its associated header.

  5. If a function that accepts a variable number of arguments is not declared (explicitly or by including its associated header), the behavior is undefined.

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