Significant name length list

[david Fridley]

> I did, however, bump up the size of the array to 127. Nobody seems to have
> run into that yet :-). If they do, I'll increase it to 256. The limit is
> just a #define in a header file.
If you could make this a command line option, then I would be convinced it was 
a feature, and not a limitation.

But, couldn't you start out with an array size of 127 and realloc it to 256 when
you came across a symbol that long.  It would take longer only if somebody used
a longer symbol name, but it would still work right.
> 
> If you think I'm wrong about doing this to maximize performance, consider
> that my compiler is within 10% of TurboC's compilation speed, and it's
> a two pass compiler as opposed to TurboC's one pass. I've estimated that
> the two pass design costs about 25% in compilation speed.

I work mostly with C to 68000 cross compilers.  I would only like to point
out that I am alot less sensative to compile time than I am to run time. I
will only have to compile a few times to get my programs debugged, but they
will be run many times.  Perhaps a fast/slow command option would be
appropriate. :)  I have had a compiler manufacture tell me that compile time
is more important than some runtime preformance features that I've looked 
for.  All I can say is, I'm the customer.
> 
> Real-world programming is always tradeoffs, no rule is absolute and no
> feature comes for free.
Absolutely!  And the more of these tradeoffs you put in the hands of the
customer the more features you have, and the fewer ARBITRARY LIMITS you
have.