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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: MAJOR ANSI C FLAW (my opinion, of course)
Message-ID: <30965@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 15-Oct-87 05:26:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.30965
Posted: Thu Oct 15 05:26:58 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Oct-87 07:24:35 EDT
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> 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?

I remain completely unconvinced that the advent of the ANSI C standard will
cause "millions of lines of C to be rewritten" to conform to the 6-character
one-case limitation.  The ANSI C standard *in no way* tightens the requirements
for fully-portable code; in fact, it substantially *loosens* those
requirements!

ANSI C compilers are required to consider internal symbols to be different if
they differ anywhere in the first 31 characters; code written to be portable to
older UNIX compilers will have no trouble with this.  They are required to
offer many library routines that may not be offered with current C
implementations; they are required to support not only "K&R C", but the
extensions subsequently made to it, such as "enum"s, "void", non-unique
structure names, etc., etc..

And, as for the 6-character one-case limits on external identifiers - if you
really want to be portable to *all* C implementations, you have to obey that
restriction *NOW*.

Any organization imposing C coding standards, or standards for C
implementations that they purchase, is completely free to to relax restrictions
so that conforming, but not strictly conforming, applications meet the coding
standards, and is completely free to impose additional restrictions on C
implementations over and beyond the minimal restriction that they be minimally
ANSI C conformant.  They could, for example, say "no C implementation shall be
purchased unless it supports at least 7 character external names without case
restrictions", if they don't care about OS/360-and-successors.

As for the claim that "the entire rest of the C community" will end up
rewriting "millions of lines of C", I can cite several organizations of whom
I'd willing to bet $10,000 *each* that they will not rewrite the bulk of the
C code in their UNIX implementations to conform to the minimal 6-character
one-case external name limitation (in fact, in many cases, they probably will
not rewrite a *single line* of C code to conform to that restriction!):

	American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation
	Apollo Computer
	Digital Equipment Corporation
	Hewlett-Packard
	International Business Machines Corporation
	Sun Microsystems
	...

(If your company isn't on this list, it's just because I didn't want to fill up
half this article with the list; if I thought people would actually take me up
on the bet, I'd lengthen the list considerably and then put in my order for an
F40....)
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com