Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!husc6!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Just Wondering
Message-ID: <10180@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 1 May 89 04:21:12 GMT
References: <17037@mimsy.UUCP> <12481@lanl.gov> <2006@quanta.eng.ohio-state.edu> <1319@ns.network.com> <232@celit.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 17

In article <232@celit.UUCP> billd@celerity (Bill Davidson) writes:
>In article <1319@ns.network.com> ddb@ns.UUCP (David Dyer-Bennet) writes:
>>Just a reminder -- for portable code, externals should still be limited
>>to 6 characters monocase.  
>If there's any justice in the world, OS's that cause this restriction
>will die a well desrved death soon.

I wouldn't argue that there's much justice in today's world,
but anyway you don't have to limit your externals as cited.
If you're coding for maximal portability, you have to be aware
of the mapping that may occur and avoid using external names
that might collide under such mapping, but you don't have to
do the mapping yourself.  If it's going to occur, the compiler,
assembler, and/or linker will do it for you.  If you're coding
for less than full portability, for example strictly for a
POSIX environment, there are much more liberal guarantees for
external identifiers.