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From: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: long identifiers
Keywords: identifiers
Message-ID: <15985@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 24 Oct 90 03:51:35 GMT
References: <15953@csli.Stanford.EDU> <487@taumet.com> <15959@csli.Stanford.EDU> <272477A0.6845@tct.uucp>
Reply-To: poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 28

In article <272477A0.6845@tct.uucp> chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>According to poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser):
>>I'm talking about code entirely under my control...
>
>Today.
What makes you think that's going to change?

>>...and which given its nature (it requires graphics facilities,
>>a mouse, lots of memory, etc.) is extremely unlikely to be ported
>>to old machines.
>
>Yet *some* routines will certainly be useful on old machines.
If somebody is actually going to pull out those routines, he or she
can certainly rename them, right? And the long descriptive names
may even help this person to find the routines of interest.

>"10.  Thou shalt foreswear, renounce, and abjure the vile heresy which
>      claimeth that 'All the world's a VAX', and have no commerce with
>      the benighted heathens who cling to this barbarous belief, that
>      the days of thy program may be long even though the days of thy
>      current machine be short."

True, but irrelevant. The use of long identifiers is much more portable
than the sort of thing Henry is talking about here (such as assuming
you can put pointers into ints, the canonical heresy), can be
expected to become more portable (as old crufty linkers go away)
and is trivally modifiable when you encounter a machine on which
it doesn't work. There are even programs available to do this.