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From: peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: MAJOR ANSI C FLAW (my opinion, of course)
Message-ID: <880@sugar.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-Oct-87 06:41:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: sugar.880
Posted: Fri Oct 16 06:41:17 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 18-Oct-87 03:04:17 EDT
References: <1132@gilsys.UUCP> <1246@bsu-cs.UUCP> <6543@brl-smoke.ARPA> <11599@labrea.STANFORD.EDU>
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 16

>                                  Of the machines I work on, I cannot think 
> of any besides a PDP that have this limitation (Sun doesn't, my VAX doesn't, 
> my PC doesn't, MAC's don't, and Amiga's don't.)

Any mainframe you can name is likely to have this limitation. Why? It's
simple... you can fit 6 uppercase letters into a 36-bit word... so why not
take advantage of this and stick all your symbols in words (yes, we know why
NOW but these systems were designed in the '60s).

Also, the PDP-11 under UNIX has a *7* character limitation (there was not, as
you implied, a null included at the end). Under RSX it has a 6 character
limitation because they used a character encoding called Radix-40 that allowed
you to fit 6 uppercase letters into a 32-bit dword.
-- 
-- Peter da Silva  `-_-'  ...!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!sugar!peter
-- Disclaimer: These U aren't mere opinions... these are *values*.