It is the only one that actually writes to memory. It's occasionally convenient, but it's also largely unnecessary: the caller can typically make multiple calls to printf, for example, noting the return value for each one. Or use strlen and fputs. And so on.
The C11 printf_s functions don't support it at all, so it's clearly already on the naughty list even from the standard's perspective.
The C11 printf_s functions don't support it at all, so it's clearly already on the naughty list even from the standard's perspective.