$ in identifiers -- poll

[BlandMA]

There have been several suggestions to resolve the $ identifier problem
by adding new constructs to the language.  Perhaps a better (at least
different) place would be to have the linker/loader (whatever you call it)
do the name translation.  I seem to recall an IBM link editor capable of
something like this.

For example, to make a call to the sys$whatever function, you would
write your code using a syntactically valid C identifier, such as
sys_whatever.  The load command would include some option to resolve
the symbol "sys_whatever" to "sys$whatever".  There would probably be
a file on the system somewhere that contains the commonly used translations
for that particular system.

I would prefer this solution over changing every compiler for
every language that currently doesn't allow $ in identifiers.
-- 
Alan Bland
{ihnp4, allegra}!druxp!mab
AT&T Information Systems Labs, Denver