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From: ron@topaz.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: MAJOR ANSI C FLAW (my opinion, of course)
Message-ID: <15664@topaz.rutgers.edu>
Date: Sat, 17-Oct-87 12:51:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.15664
Posted: Sat Oct 17 12:51:21 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 18-Oct-87 11:09:13 EDT
References: <1132@gilsys.UUCP> <1246@bsu-cs.UUCP> <6543@brl-smoke.ARPA> <104@aimt.UUCP> <8992@mimsy.UUCP> <11599@labrea.STANFORD.EDU>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 15

I should follow up the claim that early (PDP-11) unices only had
6 character C externals.  It was seven.  You didn't need to have a
null in the symbol table since the entries were fixed at eight
characters.  The _ prefix ate the eigth character.

One annoying and totally confusing bug to people who hadn't seen
it before was when your C compile did
	m 232
The C compiler had eight character significance in it's symbol
table so it realized that symbols like "abcdefgh" and "abcdefgi"
were different and made assembler code using them.  When prepended
with underscore, the differentiating last character was pushed off
the end and the assembler bitched about multiple symbol definition.

-Ron