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From: rjg@ruby.TEK.COM (Rich Greco)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: MAJOR ANSI C FLAW (my opinion, of course)
Message-ID: <407@ruby.TEK.COM>
Date: Tue, 13-Oct-87 15:06:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: ruby.407
Posted: Tue Oct 13 15:06:50 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 15-Oct-87 04:58:39 EDT
References: <1132@gilsys.UUCP> <1246@bsu-cs.UUCP> <6543@brl-smoke.ARPA> <104@aimt.UUCP>
Reply-To: rjg@ruby.UUCP (Rich Greco)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Wilsonville, OR
Lines: 23

The real shame here is not that you will restrict your own portability
if you violate the six character limit, but rather what vendors of
software and authors of other standards must do.

Look at ANSI GKS's Fortran binding.  It has a binding to the Fortran
subset, as well as one to the full language.

This heritage is continued with the C binding.  All functions in the C
binding of GKS will have six character names.

This will be continued for CGI, PHIGS, and the Window Management
function, because in authoring a standard you cannot require things
not required by a peer standard (for example 7 charcater variable
names).

This will also be compunded by software vendors who must determine how
portable they want software libraries sold by their company to be.  A
great number of the people will elect to sell libraries with short
function names.

This is indeed a real shame since descriptive rather than cryptic
variable names is something I have always felt was a requirement for a
high level language.