length of external names

[David Herron, NPR Lover]

> From: jeff at alberta.UUCP (C. J. Sampson)
> Newsgroups: net.lang.c
> Subject: Re: length of external names
> Message-ID: <380 at alberta.UUCP>
> Date: Sun, 30-Dec-84 21:38:19 EST
> 
> > The current draft says that the length limit (if any) and treatment
> > of case in external identifiers are "implementation-defined", which
> > means that implementors can do things as they wish but must document
> > their decisions.  Also, the length limit may not be shorter than 6.
> 
> Gads!  When are they going to figure out that 6 or 8 characters is *not*
> enough.  I spent three hours porting ogre to an Altos 586 running some
> ancient verson of Xenix and most of that was spent changing function
> names because I had only 7 signifcant characters.  I think that the standard
> should enforce a minimum of 32 characters.  We will make programs more
> portable and readable.

But if we enforce a minimum size then they will be portable only
within the systems that support that size.  I think "implementation-defined"
is the way to go.  At least for now.

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