Everywhere I see "it is practically identical", or something similar...
From The GNU C Programming Tutorial :
There is another function in the GNU C Library called fgetc. It is identical to getc in most respects, except that getc is usually implemented as a macro function and is highly optimised, so is preferable in most situations. (In situations where you are reading from standard input, getc is about as fast as fgetc, since humans type slowly compared to how fast computers can read their input, but when you are reading from a stream that is not interactively produced by a human, fgetc is probably better.)
What are the other differences? I have heard that they each have a different implementation (and one can be used as a macro) but, what makes them soo different (or different enough) for them to be both in the Standard C library (or specification)?
From the
Advanced Programming in Unix Environment
: