It is for structures that are badly designed, like (unfortunately) many
Unix structures. This is one thing Microsoft got right. Almost all
system-defined structures start out with a field that the user fills in
with the size of the structure before giving it to the system. If new
fields have been added at the end that the program doesn't know about,
the system simply doesn't fill them. As long as MS limits themselves
to only adding new fields at the end and not changing the meaning of the
old fields, they don't break old software.
--Tim Smith
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