+</PRE><H2><a name="h2-HISTORY">HISTORY</a></H2><PRE>
+ While <B>printw</B> was implemented in 4BSD, it was unused until 4.2BSD (which
+ used it in games). That early version of curses was before the ANSI C
+ standard. It did not use <varargs.h>, though that was available. In
+ 1991 (a couple of years after SVr4 was generally available, and after
+ the C standard was published), other developers updated the library,
+ using <stdarg.h> internally in 4.4BSD curses. Even with this improve-
+ ment, BSD curses did not use function prototypes (or even declare func-
+ tions) in the <curses.h> header until 1992.
+
+ SVr2 documented <B>printw</B>, <B>wprintw</B> tersely as "printf on <I>stdscr</I>" and
+ tersely as "printf on <I>win</I>", respectively.
+
+ SVr3 added <B>mvprintw</B>, and <B>mvwprintw</B>, with a three-line summary saying
+ that they were analogous to <B>printf(3)</B>, explaining that the string which
+ would be output from <B>printf(3)</B> would instead be output using <B>waddstr</B> on
+ the given window. SVr3 also added <B>vwprintw</B>, saying that the third pa-
+ rameter is a <B>va_list</B>, defined in <varargs.h>, and referring the reader
+ to the manual pages for <I>varargs</I> and <I>vprintf</I> for detailed descriptions.
+
+ SVr4 added no new variations of <B>printw</B>, but provided for using
+ <varargs.h> or <stdarg.h> to define the <B>va_list</B> type.
+
+ X/Open Curses added <B>vw_printw</B> to replace <B>vwprintw</B>, stating that its
+ <B>va_list</B> definition requires <stdarg.h>.
+
+