six-character extern id limit

[Rahul Dhesi]

I said that I thought Doug Gwyn exaggerated in saying that "many" C
implementors were not in a position to improve the linker that would
"of necessity" be used with the output from their compiler.  The
context was a discussion of ANSI's guaranteeing no more than 6
significant characters in external names.

Both Doug Gwyn and Henry Spencer disagree.  But although I have been
following this newsgroup for some time, I don't recall any specific
cases being described of linkers that can't handle more than
6-character externals and that will of necessity be used to link C
code.  Are there more than just a few?  (Remember, we're talking about
a 6-character limit, not 7 or 8, which are more common.)
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi