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From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: MAJOR ANSI C WART (my opinion, of course)
Message-ID: <2530@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 29-Oct-87 17:50:13 EST
Article-I.D.: mmintl.2530
Posted: Thu Oct 29 17:50:13 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 5-Nov-87 07:20:01 EST
References: <1298@wyszecki.munsell.UUCP> <1386@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <2503@mmintl.UUCP> <7637@ism780c.UUCP>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT.
Lines: 29

In article <7637@ism780c.UUCP> marv@ism780.UUCP (Marvin Rubenstein) writes:
|[I wrote:]
|>[Somebody wrote:]
|>>If the vendors don't have control over the linker, they can write their
|>>own.
|>
|>people want to link together programs written in different languages.
|
|Ah, but it can work.  I once wrote a compiler for an extended version of
|Pascal.  The compiler allowed very long identifiers. The host operating
|system linker allowed six character names using upper case only. ... [A]
|'Binder' program ... linked all the Pascal objects with their long external
|names.  If there were any unresolved references, the output of the binder was
|handed to the host system's linker.

Fine so far.  But my hypothetical developer also wants to use Ada, which
supports longer character names, and it has it's own linker, too.  Now what
do we do?

At the very least, Pascal and Ada aren't going to be able to access each
other's long variable names.

You're also going to have trouble if you have a library written in Pascal,
and want to call members from FORTRAN.  Not an insoluable problem, but
inconvient and tricky.
-- 

Frank Adams                           ihnp4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Ashton-Tate          52 Oakland Ave North         E. Hartford, CT 06108