Reserved names in ANSI C

[Michael Meissner]

In article <1989Jul1.234330.28732 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
| In article <461 at algor2.UUCP> jeffrey at algor2.UUCP (Jeffrey Kegler) writes:
| >Whose linker was this, anyway, that we are going to spend the next two
| >decades wrecking our code for?

The main two mentioned at the meetings were IBM's mainframe linker(s)
which uses 8 characters, 1 case (and the library needs some reserved
prefixes), and the Honeywell GCOS linker.  VMS' linker was also
mentioned because it too is a single case linker (though it allows 31
character names).

| Any linker that supports the bare minimum for FORTRAN.  There are more
| such linkers in the world than you'd think.
| 
| > (Couldn't the ANSI C committee have
| >found a linker somewhere that was restricted to 5 characters...
| 
| Can you say "Data General"?  I knew you could! :-)  Fortunately, as I
| understand it, even DG agreed that this was DG's mistake, and nobody
| seriously suggested munging the standard to match.

Actually, by the time the C standards group was formed, the RDOS
linker no longer had such a limit.  Heck, it had already been
obsoleted 10 years ago, when I started working at Data General.
I did mention this linker in passing at one meeting I think.

In case people are wondering why 5 characters, if you express the
symbol in RAD-50 (radix 50) notation, you can fit 5 characters in
32-bits.  In a similar fashion, the CDC 6xxx/7xxx/17x computers
limited names to 7 characters, because they could fit 7 6-bit 'bytes'
plus an 18-bit address into one 60 bit word.  These restrictions were
to make the linker run faster, since you could do a word or two
comparison, instead of calling a general string comparison function.

--
Michael Meissner, Data General.
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