Does any C or even C++ compiler catch a mismatch like that? That's a terrible bug to have. Code reviews FTW.

gcc looks at the format string for printf & co and gives a warning I think. It has to be built in to the compiler (or via metadata related to a function declaration) since using variable length argument lists removes all checking to do with type and number of arguments...

"String handling in C" is a coding horror all on it's own - no further comment is necessary.

Care to elaborate? :D

I purposely stayed away from C's formatted output for the brief time I was learning C++.

Could be worse, could be a web of pointers so convoluted that they point to nothing while trying to point to some embedded function, with an over-called string in it that still works for some reason. *shudders*

Care to elaborate?

I purposely stayed away from C's formatted output for the brief time I was learning C++.

You can overflow the buffer at any time, you don't know how long it is, you need to walk over the entire string in order to do any operation (which can easily lead to O(n2) algorithms) - strings in C basically contain everything that one should not do if one was going to design a string library. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_string_handling#Criticism and http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html for more.