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From: dave@sdeggo.UUCP (David L. Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: MAJOR ANSI C FLAW (my opinion, of course)
Message-ID: <123@sdeggo.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-Oct-87 10:36:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdeggo.123
Posted: Fri Oct 16 10:36:05 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Oct-87 23:06:55 EDT
References: <1132@gilsys.UUCP> <1246@bsu-cs.UUCP> <6543@brl-smoke.ARPA> <292@rose3.Rosemount.COM>
Organization: Lazy Programmer's Society of San Diego
Lines: 30

In article <292@rose3.Rosemount.COM>, dan@rose3.Rosemount.COM (Dan Messinger) writes:
> In summary, it takes far more than a new version of cc to get longer
> external identifiers.  It a matter of momentum (and profits).  There is
> a LOT of software that needs to be changed on the ol' PDP-11 to increase
> the external id size.  Do you know of any software houses that want to
> develope all that software, knowing that there are a fixed number of PDP-11s
> in the world, and that number is getting smaller?

Well, if software houses aren't willing to develop software for a PDP-11, who
is going to develop the ANSI standard compilers for them?  It may not be
terribly difficult to port the compiler from, say, a VAX, since they are
fairly similar, but you still have to assign people to maintain it, do
bug fixes, etc.

It seems like a circular argument to me: We have to do this so that the 
compilers which aren't written yet for a dead machine which no one is
willing to write software for can be written.

I'm not in favor of this 6 character external limit.  It may be optional,
but it seems silly to have people saying "Well, our compiler is compliant
except that it produces 32 byte external names."  Let the people with the
ancient hardware and software have the non-compliant compilers!



-- 
David L. Smith
{sdcsvax!man,ihnp4!jack!man, hp-sdd!crash, pyramid}!sdeggo!dave
man!sdeggo!dave@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu 
The net.goddesses made me do it!