My final (hah!) word on the topic: while looking at this more, I googled "nl_argmax printf" (without the quotes) and the AI summary is pretty coherent, noting that the limit varies, that the feature isn't standard C but is a POSIX thing, etc. It even points to limits.h.
As usual, once I knew the answer, the right question was easy! Thanks again. P.S. I'm betting the "NL" really means "the N Limit ["limit on N"] for this feature" but to me it reads as "National Language", as in "National Language Support", IBM's term for I18N. That'll make it easy for me to remember, not that I should ever need to again. -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Linda Chui Sent: Thursday, October 2, 2025 10:14 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Anyone using XL C? hi, As was said others, this is a C runtime issue. As seen by the runtime library reference (https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.2.0?topic=functions-fprintf-printf-sprintf-format-write-data), the maximum number of positional arguments is NL_ARGMAX. Looking at limits.h, you can see this value is 9 and hence the library is doing what it expected. You can always request this limit be raised through the IBM Idea’s forum, but it doesn’t look like a bug. Hope this helps, z/OS XL C/C++ Compiler Team ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
