Question

I’m experimenting with variable arguments in C++, using va_args. The idea is useful, and is indeed something I’ve used a lot in C# via the params functionality. One thing that frustrates me is the following excerpt regarding va_args, above:

Notice also that va_arg does not determine either whether the retrieved argument is the last argument passed to the function (or even if it is an element past the end of that list).

I find it hard to believe that there is no way to programmatically determine the number of variable arguments passed to the function from within that function itself. I would like to perform something like the following:

void fcn(int arg1 ...)
{
    va_list argList;
    va_start(argList, arg1);

    int numRemainingParams = //function that returns number of remaining parameters
    for (int i=0; i<numRemainingParams; ++i)
    {
        //do stuff with params
    }
    va_end(argList);
}

To reiterate, the documentation above suggests that va_arg doesn’t determine whether the retrieved arg is the last in the list. But I feel this information must be accessible in some manner.

Is there a standard way of achieving this?

Answer 1

I find it hard to believe that there is no way to programmatically determine the number of variable arguments passed to the function from within that function itself.

Nonetheless, it is true. C/C++ do not put markers on the end of the argument list, so the called function really does not know how many arguments it is receiving. If you need to mark the end of the arguments, you must do so yourself by putting some kind of marker at the end of the list.

The called function also has no idea of the types or sizes of the arguments provided. That’s why printf and friends force you to specify the precise datatype of the value to interpolate into the format string, and also why you can crash a program by calling printf with a bad format string.

Note that parameter passing is specified by the ABI for a particular platform, not by the C++/C standards. However, the ABI must allow the C++/C standards to be implementable. For example, an ABI might want to pass parameters in registers for efficiency, but it might not be possible to implement va_args easily in that case. So it’s possible that arguments are also shadowed on the stack. In almost no case is the stack marked to show the end of the argument list, though, since the C++/C standards don’t require this information to be made available, and it would therefore be unnecessary overhead.