Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsfcgl!seibel
From: seibel@cgl.ucsf.edu (George Seibel)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Calling FORTRAN from C (messing with the namespace)
Message-ID: <11569@cgl.ucsf.EDU>
Date: 4 May 89 03:23:18 GMT
References: <2846@tank.uchicago.edu> <5785@cbnews.ATT.COM> <10087@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1544@auspex.auspex.com> <1278@l.cc.purdue.edu> <25509@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Sender: daemon@cgl.ucsf.edu
Reply-To: seibel@hegel.mmwb.ucsf.edu (George Seibel)
Organization: Computer Graphics Lab, UCSF
Lines: 21

In article <25509@amdcad.AMD.COM> tim@amd.com (Tim Olson) writes:

 [... responding to comments on underscores getting added to names ...]

>If an underscore is not prepended (or the names changed in some standard
>unique way), then you run into the problem of potential name-space
>conflicts with the assembly-level "helper" routines that almost always
>exist.  These routines include "start" (the beginning of crt0, which
>gets control and sets everything up for your program), help for non- or
>undersupported intrinsics like unsigned modulo, short multiplies, etc.
>
>If this were not done, then a user would just get mysterious
>"multiply-defined" errors from the link of his program.

  Well, it's *a* solution to a namespace problem, albeit one that
guarantees difficulties in mixing languages.   Sure would have been
nice if they had put the underscores on the assembly-level routines
rather than mucking with the high level names.   Is there a good
reason why it wasn't done this way?

George Seibel, USCF