this is a fairly trivial thing to debate, I was just curious what your reasoning was and don't care too much whether it goes in. but consider: 
1. putc is in stdio.h, and you're trying to present a similar interface here
2. removing it breaks code. you chose the valiant--but hard and generally discouraged--route, which was to remove it, break code (which in this case was just rasdemo), and then fix all the code you broke (just rasdemo again)