This was removed in 2001 but I think it is appropriate to add it back:
* I do not want to encourage people to write fragile and non-portable echo
commands by making printf much slower than echo.
* Recent versions of Autoconf use it a lot.
* Almost no software still wants to support systems that do not have
printf(1) at all.
* In many other shells printf is already a builtin.
Side effect: printf is now always the builtin version (which behaves
identically to /usr/bin/printf) and cannot be overridden via PATH (except
via the undocumented %builtin mechanism).
Code size increases about 5K on i386. Embedded folks might want to replace
/usr/bin/printf with a hard link to /usr/bin/alias.
9897c45f31