Thread: 2 questions: WINAPI? lpcmdline?

I'm reading two books that are explaining Windows Programming.
The first is Petzold's Programming Windows, and the second is
Lamothe's Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus ().
I'm not far along in either of them...

I'm really using TOTWGPG to learnDirectX. The first couple of
of chapters in each book pretty much talk about the same thing.
They explain it in different ways, though. That's good, makes it
easier to understand.

Anywho, in Lamothe's book, it says that WINAPI forces parameters
to be passed left-to-right instead of the normal right-to-left order
with the default CDECL.

What exactly does this mean? I'm not completely finished learning
C++, but what's the default CDECL? Can someone give an
example of what Lamothe is talking about?

Second question. Lamothe says that lpcmdline (the WinMain()
parameter) is a null-terminated string that takes command-line
parameters. He says that if you create a program called TEST.exe
and launch it like this:

TEST.exe one

lpcmdline will contain the following:

lpcmdline = "one two three."

Is this just a printing mistake or something? I just want to make
sure, because if it isn't -- I'm totally lost and need an explanation
on why lpcmdline contains two extra words...

Thanks.
-ethic.

Must be a misprint. Basically, instead of handing you your argc, argv, Windows "helpfully" packs it into a single string, leaving it up to you to parse. Oddly enough, you usually can't obtain it from the third param of WinMain! You have to use something like GetCommandLine().

You'll have to talk to an ASM expert to get a definitive answer on the calling convention question, but basically, it has to do with the order that function parameters are pushed onto the stack, and how everything gets cleaned up after the function call.