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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: <31140@sun.uucp>
Date: Fri, 16-Oct-87 19:06:55 EDT
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Posted: Fri Oct 16 19:06:55 1987
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> 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!

Oh, good grief.  A compiler that "is compliant except that it produces 32 byte
external names" is COMPLETELY compliant.  There is NOTHING in the ANSI standard
that says that a compiler producing long external names is non-compliant.
Period.  End of discussion.

What the standard says is that programs *written* in C are not *strictly*
conforming, which means you aren't guaranteed to be able to compile and run it
on *every single ANSI-conforming C implementation*.  This doesn't necessarily
mean that it won't compile and run on 90% of the ANSI-conforming C
implementations out there.

The ANSI C standard is not going to force *anybody* to use 6-character one-case
external names, unless they're interested in porting to every single
ANSI-conforming C implementation out there - but if they're *that* interested
in portability, they may already have decided that they have to restrict
themselves to 6-character one-case external names.

Once more: the adoption of the ANSI C standard will not force ANY C
implementations to limit themselves to 6-character one-case external names.
Anybody out there who still believes this should stop doing so.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com