Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!elroy!cit-vax!oberon!sm.unisys.com!ism780c!news
From: news@ism780c.isc.com (News system)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "Numerical Recipes in C" is nonport
Message-ID: <17030@ism780c.isc.com>
Date: 1 Oct 88 02:36:26 GMT
References: <703.2339B3CB@stjhmc.fidonet.org> <8569@smoke.ARPA> <16711@ism780c.isc.com> <1988Sep28.162748.6373@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: marv@ism780.UUCP (Marvin Rubenstein)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica CA
Lines: 35


Doug?
>>The proposed ANS for C does NOT repeat NOT prohibit implementations
>>from supporting more than 6 monocase characters of significance in
>>external identifiers.

[Marv]
>>Absolutly true.  But it does prevent me form *using* external identifiers
>>with more than 6 monocase characters if I want to be certain that my programs
>>will be accepted by *all* conforming C compililation systems.

[Henry]
>No, not quite right.  For one thing, the identifiers can be longer than
>6 characters, they just can't *rely* on being longer, i.e. they must be
	       ^^^^
		  who are the 'they' that can't rely? :-)

>distinct in the first six.  And second, it is not ANSI which is causing
>this,

[Marv again]
I was not suggesting that ANSI should do anything about the 6 character
problem.  I was just pointing out even though some compiler implementers are
kind enough to provide long names, I could not take advantage of their
kindness and write programs with names like 'interval_two' and
'interval_three' if I want to run on a old fashion system.

BTW.  It isn't all that hard to supply long names on the old systems.  I
once had to write a compiler supporting long names on a 6 character system.
What I did was write my own library-archive program and my own linker.  My
linker linked objects from the special archive and built a module that the
standard system linker could process so as to finish the job.  The effort
added about six staff weeks to the compiler project.

   Marv Rubinstein