> Next, strtok is not thread-safe. That's because it uses a static buffer internally. So, you should take care that only one thread in your program calls strtok at a time.

I wonder why strtok() does not use an output parameter similar to scanf() — and return the number of tokens. Something like:

  int strtok(char *str, char *delim, char **tokens);

Granted, it would involve dynamic memory allocation and the implementation that immediately comes to mind would be less efficient than the current implementation, but surely it’s worth eliminating the kind of bugs the current strtok() can introduce?

Does anyone here have the historical prospective?