Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!buengc!bph
From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Reserved names in ANSI C
Message-ID: <3364@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 2 Jul 89 17:41:01 GMT
References: <GEOFF.89Jun11231924@onyx.cs.warwick.ac.uk> <13680@haddock.ima.isc.com> <1598@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <875@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> <316@mountn.dec.com> <884@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> <321@mountn.dec.com> <461@algor2.UUCP> <1989Jul1.234330.28732@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.std.c
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 29

In article <1989Jul1.234330.28732@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <461@algor2.UUCP> jeffrey@algor2.UUCP (Jeffrey Kegler) writes:
>>Whose linker was this, anyway, that we are going to spend the next two
>>decades wrecking our code for?
>
>Any linker that supports the bare minimum for FORTRAN.  There are more
>such linkers in the world than you'd think.

Which begs the question:  how difficult is it to have standard-conforming
implementations implement a linker that handles a larger name space?

(Yeah, I know.  C is not a linker, so the linker is beyond the scope of the
standard.  So, too, was once the library...)

Corrollarily, ("corrollarily"? :) how hard is it to increase the
external identifier size allowed by a linker?  (Actually, it should have
been "lemmatically," but the chronology is bass-ackwards...)

>> (Couldn't the ANSI C committee have
>>found a linker somewhere that was restricted to 5 characters...
>
>Can you say "Data General"?  I knew you could! :-)

Say it?  I can SEE it, if I walk downstairs.

				--Blair
				  "Although it's been a long
				   time since the DG has seen
				   mobile electrons, apparently..."