Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!ulysses!hector!jss
From: jss@hector.UUCP (Jerry Schwarz)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: MAJOR ANSI C FLAW
Message-ID: <3118@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Date: Fri, 23-Oct-87 10:57:25 EST
Article-I.D.: ulysses.3118
Posted: Fri Oct 23 10:57:25 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Oct-87 15:51:07 EST
References: <2997@husc6.UUCP> <2520@cbmvax.UUCP> <1748@chinet.UUCP> <171@nusdhub.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com
Reply-To: jss@hector (Jerry Schwarz)
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill
Lines: 13
Keywords: Six character external identifier minimum conformance ANSI standard

I don't like a minmax of six significant characters, but in practice
I ignore it.  A minmax of 32 would be much worse, because 32 is still
too short but some system developers would take such a number in the
ANSI C Standard as endorsement of this limit.  They might even "fix"
their systems to ignore characters after the thirty-second.

I know that 32 sounds like enough when you are thinking of human
generated code, but when you start thinking about machine generated
code (e.g. intermediate code of the C++ compiler) you realize that 32
can easily be exceeded.

Jerry Schwarz 
Bell Labs