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From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Empty source file
Message-ID: <11302@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 16 Oct 89 04:54:06 GMT
References: <10955@riks.csl.sony.co.jp> <9802@chinet.chi.il.us>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 19

In article <9802@chinet.chi.il.us> kdb@chinet.chi.il.us (Karl Botts) writes:
>Are you sure this is true; I find it hard to believe.  It is quite
>reasonable and not uncommon to have source files which are empty after the
>preoprocessor gets done with them.  I have had such in the past, and have
>explicitly tested it on xeveral compilers, and empty source files do
>compile to do-nothing objects, which seems right to me.

Unfortunately, many linkers do not accept contentless object modules.
If you say that's a stupid way to design linkers, I would agree, but
it doesn't change the fact that such linkers exist.  Therefore the
"universal" definition for the language must require of a strictly
conforming (i.e., maximally portable) program that it contain SOMEthing.

Actually, I think this should have been: SOMEthing with EXTERNAL LINKAGE,
since about as many linkers have problems with that as with empty objects.
The proposed Standard does not seem to specify this the way I thought we
intended; it seems to permit a translation unit to have just an object
declaration with internal linkage, so long as the object is not used in
an expression.