Xref: utzoo comp.software-eng:2623 comp.misc:7593 Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) Newsgroups: comp.software-eng,comp.misc Subject: Re: Coding standards (was Re: Programmer productivity) Message-ID: <1989Dec6.154103.2078@twwells.com> Date: 6 Dec 89 15:41:03 GMT References: <1989Dec5.152225.25770@twwells.com> <14836@well.UUCP> Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL Lines: 33 In article <14836@well.UUCP> Jef Poskanzer writes: : In the referenced message, bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) wrote: : }In article <9185@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes: : }: WHAT? What year is this? I don't think I've ever used a linker that : }: didn't eliminate unused routines. Any such linker would be seriously : }: brain damaged. : } : }Most linkers will not take, from a single object file, just those : }routines needed by the rest of the program. : : Tim is (almost certainly) wrong that he has never used such a brain : damaged linker, since every Unix linker is brain damaged in this fashion. : : However, T. Bill is wrong that most linkers have this brain damage, since : pretty much every NON-Unix linker works correctly. Eh? I've worked on a dozen or so non-Unix machines. Only a few of them were capable of taking apart an object file and using only the routines you needed. And those linkers could not be used with a C compiler that did not play games with static variable names. (They had no notion of static at all.) I'll admit that many of those machines were used over eight years ago, so things might be better now, but I doubt it. IBM, for example, does not change all that quickly. Care to name some specific systems where the linker could take apart an object file, and for which a reasonable C compiler exists? --- Bill { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill bill@twwells.com