On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

: I believe OpenBSD may have the guts of some of this stuff, if someone
: felt it was a) a standard and b) worth stealing.

XPG, I'm pretty sure.  The reasoning is for better support of
internationalization via their standard <nl_types.h>, where positional
parameters can be moved about in a translated message.

The format is:

%N$....q

where N is the argument number in decimal, .... is the standard formatting
options offered by type q, and q is the format type.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)