bug#8435: misuse of error ("...%d...", ...) on 64-bit hosts

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 09 Apr 2011 12:39:59 -0700
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> CC: 8435@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> As Emacs evolves, if we find that more lines of code are affected,
> then the tradeoffs will change.  If that happens, it shouldn't
> be hard to come up with a doprnt replacement that uses
> vsnprintf internally and that also handles multibyte character
> truncation and non-8-bit codepoints.

I'd prefer that we do this now.  Leaving the problem to lurk for
future maintainers to deal with it would mean maintenance burden
and/or subtle bugs waiting to bite.

Emacs is a large and complex program, with many areas of its code
understandable only by a tiny few, sometimes by a single individual.
Leaving such dark corners means trading somebody else's future efforts
for our current convenience.  I just spent the best part of my weekend
hunting `int's that should have been EMACS_INT's (which, btw, is the
only _real_ problem with overflow that I know about), and I would hate
to leave similar problems to those who will come after us.