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From: breck@aimt.UUCP (Robert Breckinridge Beatie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: MAJOR ANSI C FLAW (my opinion, of course)
Message-ID: <104@aimt.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 12-Oct-87 19:47:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: aimt.104
Posted: Mon Oct 12 19:47:22 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Oct-87 01:20:54 EDT
References: <1132@gilsys.UUCP> <1246@bsu-cs.UUCP> <6543@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Organization: AIM Technology, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 27
Summary: Yep, six characters seems awfully short

In article <6543@brl-smoke.ARPA>, gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
> ... We don't like it either, but it IS
> necessary for some environments.

Hmmm...  why is a 6 character limit necessary in any environment?  I'm not
necessarily disagreeing with you.  But I am curious.

> 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..

Well, isn't portability the reason we need a standard in the first place?
A standard that programmers are *strongly* tempted to disregard seems to be
of little, if any, use.

In addition, this standard actually seems to be a step backward at least in
this regard.  As you pointed out (sorry for deleting the lines) even PDP unix
C compilers supported a 7 character external name.  Why are we now being limited
even more severely?

I have to agree with the original poster on this one.  It's really hard to
pack much meaning into 6 characters of variable name.  Or is this just a way
of getting programmers to restrict their use of global variables?  :-)
-- 
Breck Beatie
uunet!aimt!breck