+.I \%ncurses
+provides \fB\%vwprintw\fP,
+but marks it as deprecated.
+.SH HISTORY
+While \fB\%printw\fP was implemented in 4BSD
+(November 1980),
+.\" https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=4BSD/usr/src/lib/\
+.\" libcurses/printw.c
+it was unused until 4.2BSD
+(August 1983),
+which employed it for games.
+That early version of
+.I curses
+preceded the ANSI C standard of 1989.
+It did not use \fI\%varargs.h\fP,
+though that had been available since Seventh Edition Unix (1979).
+.\" https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/include/\
+.\" varargs.h
+In 1991
+(a couple of years after SVr4 was generally available,
+and after the C standard was published),
+other developers updated the library,
+using \fI\%stdarg.h\fP internally in 4.4BSD
+.IR curses .
+Even with this improvement,
+BSD
+.I curses
+did not use function prototypes
+(nor even declare functions)
+in \fI\%curses.h\fP until 1992.
+.PP
+SVr2 (1984) documented \fB\%printw\fP and \fB\%wprintw\fP tersely as
+\*(``printf on \fB\%stdscr\fP\*('' and
+\*(``printf on \fIwin\fP\*('',
+respectively.
+.PP
+SVr3 (1987) added \fB\%mvprintw\fP and \fB\%mvwprintw\fP,
+with a three-line summary asserting that they were analogous to
+\fI\%printf\fP(3),
+explaining that the string that \fI\%printf\fP(3) would write to the
+standard output stream would instead be output using \fB\%waddstr\fP to
+the given window.
+SVr3 also implemented \fB\%vwprintw\fP,
+describing its third parameter as a \fI\%va_list\fP,
+defined in \fI\%varargs.h\fP,
+and referred the reader to the manual pages for \fI\%varargs\fP and
+\fI\%vprintf\fP for detailed descriptions.
+.PP
+SVr4 (1989) introduced no new variations of \fI\%printw\fP,
+but provided for using either \fI\%varargs.h\fP or \fI\%stdarg.h\fP to
+define the \fI\%va_list\fP type.
+.\" either header declares "va_list", but only one can be used
+.PP
+X/Open Curses, Issue 4 (1995),
+defined \fB\%vw_printw\fP to replace \fB\%vwprintw\fP,
+stating that its \fI\%va_list\fP type is defined in \fI\%stdarg.h\fP.