the 'entry' reserved word

[kenny at uiucdcsb.CS.UIUC.EDU]

/* Written  2:10 am  Nov 14, 1985 by ted at cdp.UUCP in uiucdcsb:net.lang.c */

My best guess is that "entry" was a unique symbol which the
loader used to find the entry subroutine which would call
main (or possibly _main as it does in most C implementations
today)?  Dennis Ritchie : what say?

				Ted Goldstein
/* End of text from uiucdcsb:net.lang.c */

On the AT&T implementation of C on G(E)COS (which predates Un*x), the entry
subroutine was called `.SETU.`. The periods in the name make it syntactically
illegal for C, of course, but there were ways around that.

The 'fortran' keyword was used to specify that the compiler should generate
calls to particular procedures compatible with the calling sequence used by
FORTRAN A (or was it FORTRAN Y?  Was years ago, and I forget).  Something
like

	extern fortran real sine(), cosine();

was used to drag in the trig functions, for instance.

'asm' is still a keyword to many of the compilers, and is used to insert
assembly code into the program, e.g.:

	/*	Now set up fp and sp to use the ppprcs stack space	*/

	asm ("	movl	a3,fp");
	asm ("	movl	a3,sp");

It was invented to allow even the really cruddy low-level stuff to be written
at least partially in C.

Opinions expressed herein are those of the daemon possessing my terminal.

Kevin Kenny
kenny at Uiuc.ARPA		kenny at Uiuc.CSNET	
{ihnp4,pur-ee,convex}!uiucdcs!kenny	(UUCP)
Snail: Forget it.