Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!tuvie!vmars!hp
From: hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at (Peter Holzer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: long identifiers
Keywords: identifiers
Message-ID: <1925@tuvie>
Date: 25 Oct 90 15:06:04 GMT
References: <15953@csli.Stanford.EDU> <487@taumet.com> <15959@csli.Stanford.EDU> <272477A0.6845@tct.uucp>
Sender: news@tuvie
Lines: 40

chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes:

>From my wall:

>"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."

>    -- "The Ten Commandments for C Programmers" by Henry Spencer

And a few lines higher on your wall (and mine) it reads:

9.	Thy external identifiers shall be unique in the first six 
	characters, though this harsh discipline be irksome and the 
	years of its necessity stretch before thee seemingly without 
	end, lest thou tear thy hair out and go mad on that fateful 
	day when thou desirest to make thy program run on an old system.


But replacing long identfiers by short ones can be automated easily with
an awk script or the shroud program posted a few months ago, so I don't
think the length of identifiers should be a criterion while writing your
program.

IMHO you should write your program readable, and long identifiers add a lot
to readability. Restricting identifier names to 6 characters is a BUG and
not a FEATURE, and I think you should work around bugs only if you encounter
them.

There are other problems with porting C programs that are a lot more 
difficult to solve (especially between ANSI-C and pcc-derivatives), so
lets concentrate on solving these.

--
|    _  | Peter J. Holzer                       | Think of it   |
| |_|_) | Technical University Vienna           | as evolution  |
| | |   | Dept. for Real-Time Systems           | in action!    |
| __/   | hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at                 |     Tony Rand |