AT&T 7300 C Compiler/variable name lengths

[Dan Messinger]

In article <173 at lems.UUCP> rim at lems.UUCP writes:
>From: rim (Roderick McAllery)
>
>This is one user of C compilers that gets very annoyed at the brain damaged 
>attitude of people who write assemblers that only accept 8 character 
>identifiers.
>
>It seems that the 7300 is just another machine that has old type software 
>shuffled onto it.  Assemblers written for systems with large address spaces
>that have symbol tables that cannot handle long identifiers exemplify
>an attitude that dates back to a time before people were interested
>in software engineering.

I have before me the PC 7300 assembly manual, which says "There is no limit
on the length of an identifier", while the C manual says "Although there is
no limit on the length of a name, only initial characters are significant:
at least eight of a non-external name, and perhaps fewer for external names"
My 7300 is not accessible to me at the moment, so I can not try an imperical
test, but I would interpret this to mean that the 8 character limit is not
a result of the assembler, which is not limited to 8 characters of significance,
but a restriction imposed by the C compiler itself.

Dan Messsinger
ihnp4!umn-cs!digi-g!dan