"Numerical Recipes in C" is nonport

[Henry Spencer]

In article <4071 at bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi at bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>Actually, it's even easier than that.  The C compiler can generate an
>internal object format.  A custom post-processor takes these object
>files, scans for all long identifiers, shortens them to unique 6-char
>names, and produces as its output system-format object files ready for
>the standard linker.  No linking need be done by this post processor.

Right, so we build it into the output phase of the compiler, since it
doesn't have to do any linking.  Now we have a compiler whose output
contains only 6-character names.  How is this an improvement on simply
doing that from the beginning?  Remember that the rule applies only to
external names, so it's how the names appear to the outside world --
to libraries, to modules written in other languages, to linkers -- that
matters.  It's easy to say "shortens them to unique 6-char names", but
making that nice phrase *work* is just a wee bit harder.
-- 
NASA is into artificial        |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
stupidity.  - Jerry Pournelle  | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu