+</PRE><H2><a name="h2-HISTORY">HISTORY</a></H2><PRE>
+ While <STRONG>printw</STRONG> 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 <STRONG>printw</STRONG>, <STRONG>wprintw</STRONG> tersely as "printf on <EM>stdscr</EM>" and
+ tersely as "printf on <EM>win</EM>", respectively.
+
+ SVr3 added <STRONG>mvprintw</STRONG>, and <STRONG>mvwprintw</STRONG>, with a three-line summary saying
+ that they were analogous to <STRONG>printf(3)</STRONG>, explaining that the string which
+ would be output from <STRONG>printf(3)</STRONG> would instead be output using <STRONG>waddstr</STRONG> on
+ the given window. SVr3 also added <STRONG>vwprintw</STRONG>, saying that the third pa-
+ rameter is a <STRONG>va_list</STRONG>, defined in <varargs.h>, and referring the reader
+ to the manual pages for <EM>varargs</EM> and <STRONG>vprintf</STRONG> for detailed descriptions.
+
+ SVr4 added no new variations of <STRONG>printw</STRONG>, but provided for using
+ <varargs.h> or <stdarg.h> to define the <STRONG>va_list</STRONG> type.
+
+ X/Open Curses added <STRONG>vw_printw</STRONG> to replace <STRONG>vwprintw</STRONG>, stating that its
+ <STRONG>va_list</STRONG> definition requires <stdarg.h>.
+
+