The type of programmer who swaps the args to fread tends to be the type of programmer who doesn't bother to check the return value, fortunately.

Edit: mort96: So did you check the return value or not?

If I have a buffer of bytes, and I intend to treat the content of that buffer as individual bytes, what is semantically wrong with "read 65k 1-byte-sized items into this buffer"? Wouldn't it be a bit unnatural to express it as "read one item whose size is 65k"?

But the args aren't necessarily swapped just because they end up in a slow case in some implementation.