Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!apple!vsi1!daver!athsys!jim
From: jim@athsys.uucp (Jim Becker)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Including header files minimally.
Message-ID: <192@tityus.UUCP>
Date: 16 Nov 88 20:03:39 GMT
References: <681@quintus.UUCP>
Organization: Athena Systems, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 31

From article <681@quintus.UUCP>, by ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe):
> In article <186@tityus.UUCP> jim@athsys.uucp (Jim Becker) describes
>>a special option for
>>the compiler that would take the symbol table that it currently had
>>and outputing the content as a "library" file.
> 
>>I have been surprised that this concept hasn't yet come into
>>other products that I have crossed paths with, as it seems very
>>elegant and nice (w/ not much effort).
> 
> That's an _old_ technique!  Burroughs were using it _years_ ago on
> their mainframe Algol, Fortran, COBOL, &c compilers.  It has been
> described several times in the technical literature.  And of course
> Simula 67 was doing fully type-checked separate compilation with
> symbol-table files before C (plain C) was dreamed of.


	Ok -- I guess that it's been around for a long time, I haven't
worked with any Burroughs equipment and hadn't seen it w/ the machines
that I have worked on.

	If this is such a time honored technique, the next question is
"Why isn't it used everywhere?". Like I said, my experience has only
seen it implemented on the Amiga, but I have worked will just about
all the DEC line, Data General line (thru 83), Sun and others. Is there
some legal problem with people putting it into the compiler? This is
a fairly simple, and I guess widely used in some circles, technique
that could greatly aid this include dependency problem of C++. Wny 
isn't this already part of the environment?

-Jim Becker