Bug in Unix System V C compiler

[Mats Wichmann]

The sharp wit and biting sarcasm of the referenced articles has me falling
asleep. I am not going to hope that this old argument can be put to rest,
but....could we please try? The use of long identifiers provided in the
BSD compiler is typical of nonportable language exentsions that we have
all suffered through with many other languages, and it would have been 
nice if this could have been avoided with C. However.....now AT&T is
muddying the waters with flexnames in the Sys V compiler, while the
ANSI standard proposal does not call for this `feature'. It is hard to
flame someone for using the tools available to him locally, UNLESS that
person is specifically working on a commercial product designed to be
portable. For some reason we (and I don't claim innocence here myself)
seem very ready to pronounce the author of a program an idiot for using
some particular feature. 

	    Mats Wichmann
	    Dual Systems Corp.
	    ...{ucbvax,amd,ihnp4,cbosgd,decwrl,fortune}!dual!mats