the non-prototype declaration of basename in string.h is an ugly
compromise to avoid breaking 2 types of broken software:
1. programs which assume basename is declared in string.h and thus
would suffer from dangerous pointer-truncation if an implicit
declaration were used.
2. programs which include string.h with _GNU_SOURCE defined but then
declare their own prototype for basename using the incorrect GNU
signature for the function (which would clash with a correct
prototype).
however, since C++ does not have non-prototype declarations and
interprets them as prototypes for a function with no arguments, we
must omit it when compiling C++ code. thankfully, all known broken
apps that suffer from the above issues are written in C, not C++.
GNU programs may expect the GNU version of basename, which has a
different prototype (argument is const-qualified) and prototype it
themselves too. of course if they're expecting the GNU behavior for
the function, they'll still run into problems, but at least this
eliminates some compile-time failures.
note that it still will have the standards-conformant behavior, not
the GNU behavior. but at least this prevents broken code from ending
up with truncated pointers due to implicit declarations...
programs that use this tend to horribly botch international text
support, so it's questionable whether we want to support it even in
the long term... for now, it's just a dummy that calls strcmp.
Rich Felker