Why is the identifier "printf" known by the frontend?

[Wolfgang Draxinger]

Until now I always imported std.stdio to get printf, but today I
compiled a program where I forgot that, so fwrite, fread and the
other std.c.stdio functions were missing. But not printf;
obviously it is made avaliable by the compiler, which I don't
understand, since eventually you don't want to use printf in
your programs (for whatever reason) or want to implement a
alternative.

What is the reason for that? "import std.stdio" is not a real
difficult thing to type.

Wolfgang Draxinger
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