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Just to make it clear. I'm aware of the fact that these functions have security implications. Nonetheless when such decisions are made, I believe it's important to explain them—at least briefly—directly in the code itself.



With the way they are banned, you see it only as a compiler warning on implicit declaration of function (or at linking stage, if warnings are suppressed; idk what exact build process is). Afair, there is no evidence of banned.h in an error trace. So you have to look it up by yourself anyway.

They could rename them as “sorry X is unsafe and creates too much trouble” maybe, but in today’s internet “X considered harmful” is a common search query that everyone in the field is expected to know.


Fair point. It seems that more and more projects use "-Werror" which causes the compilation to stop and show you exactly where the error comes from[1]. Second point is that searching for "is_a_banned_function" in the code directly points to this file.

[1] https://ideone.com/h0g8F1




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