Identifier length?

[Mark H. Colburn]

In article <3780 at geaclib.UUCP> daveb at geaclib.UUCP (David Collier-Brown) writes:
>  At this point I usually detail a scheme for upgrading one's linker.
>(Sorry, its on the verge of being a knee-jerk reaction...)  I'll
>refrain this time and point out that companies expecting to sell
>computers to the U.S. and perhaps Canadian government have reason to
>extend their linkers to meet the requirements for structured name
>spaces sufficient to support Ada [tm, betimes].

This tends to be my reaction too.  However, there are some companies which
do not want to touch their linkers.  Some of these, because their current
linker works, and fixing it might mean breaking it.  Others, as has been
pointed out before, may not even have the source code to their linkers to
upgrade them.

It is a sad state of affairs, to be sure.  Here we are, heading into the
1990's, still using 1960's technology for some things.  It's a shame, but
it's true.  Concesions to reality.

>  Given that precious experience is a consideration in these
>standardization efforts, would someone care to comment on the
>**in**advisability of extending the minimum external identifier
>length as of the next standardization of the C language.

It would most likely depend on the feeling of the working group at the time
of the next standard.  It may well be that some of the "Big Boys" as Henry
called them, may have upgraded their linkers by then, and if so, they may 
be willing to drop the 6 character name limit.  I hope so.

Along the same lines, there are some problems with read and write that
should probably be cleared up as well.  The current dPS says that writing
to an existing file may cause it to be truncated beyond the point that the
file was written.  This make things like writing a data-base difficult to
do as a "strictly conforming application".  The comment that I got back
from the working group was that this behavior was required by some
systems.

The standards group is trying to get the language availale for the widest
variety of computers and operating systems that they can.  I can appreciate
the effort and the compromises required to achieve that goal, being on a
standards committee myself.  I don't agree with all of the decisions made
by X3J11, but I am sure that they did as good a job as they (or anybody
else) could given the diverse systems which they had to support.

-- 
Mark H. Colburn                  "Look into a child's eye;
Minnetech Consulting, Inc.        there's no hate and there's no lie;
mark at jhereg.mn.org                there's no black and there's no white."