Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!purdue!gatech!mcnc!rti!xyzzy!tiktok!meissner From: meissner@tiktok.dg.com (Michael Meissner) Newsgroups: comp.std.c Subject: Re: Reserved names in ANSI C Message-ID: <7734@xyzzy.UUCP> Date: 13 Jul 89 00:07:06 GMT References: <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> Sender: usenet@xyzzy.UUCP Reply-To: meissner@tiktok.UUCP (Michael Meissner) Organization: Data General (Languages @ Research Triangle Park, NC.) Lines: 38 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? The main two mentioned at the meetings were IBM's mainframe linker(s) which uses 8 characters, 1 case (and the library needs some reserved prefixes), and the Honeywell GCOS linker. VMS' linker was also mentioned because it too is a single case linker (though it allows 31 character names). | Any linker that supports the bare minimum for FORTRAN. There are more | such linkers in the world than you'd think. | | > (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! :-) Fortunately, as I | understand it, even DG agreed that this was DG's mistake, and nobody | seriously suggested munging the standard to match. Actually, by the time the C standards group was formed, the RDOS linker no longer had such a limit. Heck, it had already been obsoleted 10 years ago, when I started working at Data General. I did mention this linker in passing at one meeting I think. In case people are wondering why 5 characters, if you express the symbol in RAD-50 (radix 50) notation, you can fit 5 characters in 32-bits. In a similar fashion, the CDC 6xxx/7xxx/17x computers limited names to 7 characters, because they could fit 7 6-bit 'bytes' plus an 18-bit address into one 60 bit word. These restrictions were to make the linker run faster, since you could do a word or two comparison, instead of calling a general string comparison function. -- Michael Meissner, Data General. Uucp: ...!mcnc!rti!xyzzy!meissner If compiles were much Internet: meissner@dg-rtp.DG.COM faster, when would we Old Internet: meissner%dg-rtp.DG.COM@relay.cs.net have time for netnews?