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You joke, but this is almost reasonable. When refactoring a large codebase riddled with strncpy, strcpy and strcmp, understanding unambiguously what code does shouldn't come down to my middle aged eyes being able to parse better than a compiler. I did a global search and replace with a #define, verified the object code diff'd against the original version, and never looked back.

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As usual I'm joking but somewhat serious. Step one is better replacement functions. Step two actually should be make the bad ones feel sleezy.

One thing I think is the problem with making safer string functions is it's hard to do that while staying at the same very low level of abstraction. And I think a lot of code out there sets up string functions to work off incomplete information. (here is a pointer to a string buffer, trust me it's big enough to hold what you'll stuff in it)

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