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From: jwf@munsell.UUCP (Jim Franklin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: MAJOR ANSI C FLAW (my opinion, of course)
Message-ID: <1298@wyszecki.munsell.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 14-Oct-87 15:07:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: wyszecki.1298
Posted: Wed Oct 14 15:07:53 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 16-Oct-87 07:00:24 EDT
Organization: Eikonix Corp., Bedford, MA
Lines: 34

The proposed ANSI C limit of 6 characters on external symbols is
completely bogus.  It will make a great deal of existing code
non-complying, and the thought of the federal government mandating
compliance with such brain damage is frightening.

The "justification" given for the limit is that ANSI C needs to be
supported by many vendors in order for it to succeed as a standard, and
there exists a variety of obsolete compilers and linkers that will only
support 6 character externals.

Suppose the ANSI C standard permitted a more "reasonable" limit, say 16
or 32 characters.  Companies with compilers/linkers that couldn't handle
this limit would have to fix them.  So what?  If I had to guess, most of
this obsolete software is owned by very large companies like IBM, DEC,
HP, PRIME, etc.  These companies have large resources ($$$ and people),
and they also sell a lot of systems/software. They therefore have a large
incentive to fix their obsolete software, and the resources to do it.

What is better?  Having a few companies with large resources and a large
potential payback fix a few compilers/linkers, or have the entire rest of
the C community rewrite many millions of lines of C?

Give me a break!  How hard is it to make an existing compiler/linker
accept longer names?  If it isn't just changing the line
        #define MAX_EXTERN_LEN  6
to
        #define MAX_EXTERN_LEN  32
then the company that wrote that software deserves to be screwed, not
the rest of the C community.
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{harvard!adelie,{decvax,allegra,talcott}!encore}!munsell!jwf

Jim Franklin, Eikonix Corp., 23 Crosby Drive, Bedford, MA 01730
Phone: (617) 663-2115 x415