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From: farren@gethen.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: MAJOR ANSI C FLAW (my opinion, of course)
Message-ID: <242@gethen.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 21-Oct-87 18:54:50 EST
Article-I.D.: gethen.242
Posted: Wed Oct 21 18:54:50 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Oct-87 06:48:24 EST
References: <2997@husc6.UUCP> <2520@cbmvax.UUCP> <1748@chinet.UUCP>
Reply-To: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Organization: Sci-Fido - Unix in Oakland
Lines: 20
Keywords: Six character external identifier minimum conformance ANSI standard

In article <1748@chinet.UUCP> dag@chinet.UUCP (Daniel A. Glasser) writes:
>Oh come on now!  It has been said before, and will be said again...
>I have a copy of the ANSI document in front of me, and the six character
>limit is not a fixed number -- It is a MINIMUM for conforming compilers.

Not only that, but utilities exist, and have for some time, which will
translate long identifiers into short identifiers + an include file full
of #defines, taking care of the problem quite handily.  Including such
a facility into the preprocessor, invoked with an optional command line
argument, should take little effort.  This doesn't, of course, fix
everything, as there are still issues regarding special cases like source
level debuggers, but it would certainly make the process of coping with
obsolescent compilers/linkers/loaders transparent in most cases where
portability is an issue.

-- 
----------------
Michael J. Farren      "... if the church put in half the time on covetousness
unisoft!gethen!farren   that it does on lust, this would be a better world ..."
gethen!farren@lll-winken.arpa             Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days"