Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!polya!kaufman
From: kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: LSC 3.0, argc & argv, linking
Message-ID: <3860@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 7 Sep 88 15:29:46 GMT
References: <66791@sun.uucp> <2391@pixar.UUCP>
Reply-To: kaufman@polya.Stanford.EDU (Marc T. Kaufman)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 18

In article <2391@pixar.UUCP> upstill@pixar.UUCP (Steve Upstill) writes:

>    I say it's unfair to expect ThinkC to do something Unix C doesn't: allow
>the user to supercede an arbitrary function from a library.  The Unix
>linker links in a whole module whenever it defines a single undefined symbol.

You imply that the link problem is a "C" restriction.  It is not.  It is a
problem with a particular LINKER implementation.  There is no requirement that
there be more than one entry point in a module, or that specific entry points
cannot be overridden quietly...  I had such a linker on a VAX I used, as well
as many other large mainframe machines.  There is no way a user can know in
advance just which entry points are grouped into "modules".  For the sake of
portability, I often include my own version of routines which may be present
on some, but not all, systems the code may run on (such as atan2).  It is
reasonable to expect that a linker will honor my requests to override specific
modules.

Marc Kaufman (kaufman@polya.stanford.edu)