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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: MAJOR ANSI C FLAW (my opinion, of course)
Message-ID: <6543@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 9-Oct-87 23:51:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.6543
Posted: Fri Oct  9 23:51:52 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 12-Oct-87 02:52:28 EDT
References: <1132@gilsys.UUCP> <1246@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 15

In article <1246@bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>No modern system requires such short external identifiers.

Excuse me, but if that were true you can bet that X3J11 would not
have imposed the restriction!  We don't like it either, but it IS
necessary for some environments.

>Consider 8 significant characters to be a reasonable limit.

That's one too many for PDP-11 UNIX, or for most pre-flexnames UNIXes.

There is nothing in X3.159-198x that PROHIBITS a programmer from
exploiting support for longer, case-sensitive external names; it
just doesn't guarantee that such code will port painlessly to
all C implementations.  That's simply a fact of life..