Declarations and defaulting in C

[Kenneth Almquist]

> The other point which bothers me, even more, is the limitation of
> six significant characters in external names.   It seems to me that
> the cost of converting a few linkers from 6 characters to some
> larger number (say, 16 -- even 10 or 12 would be a vast improvement)
> is much less than the cost of having programmers figure out
> meaningful six-character names to use.

How spoiled we get running under UN*X.  In much of the rest of the
world, things are not simple.  If you don't have source code, you
have to convince your operating system vendor to convert the loader.
Your vendor has probably committed itself to supporting a particular
object format until the end of time, and is probably not interested
in supporting a second format until the end of time as well.  The
reason that a six character limitation was imposed to begin with
may have been to allow an identifier to fit in a single word; if
so increasing the identifier length could require rewriting most
of the loader (which was written in assebmly language, of course),
and the result would likely run slower.  No manufacturer would even
consider making its system run slower for the benefit of a few
oddballs who want to run C.

A UN*X standard (assuming that one is ever released) should probably
guarentee long global names and the ascii character set.
				Kenneth Almquist