Canonical Hello!

[Christopher Lange]

main() {
        printf("Hello, world!\n") ;
        system("ksh $a/c/hello.explained") ;
        exit(0);
}

According to the Usenet "Jargon" file, HELLO WORLD is:

                the first C program

required of a novice C programmer. Compilers that produce large
executables from such a program, or require bulky linking/loading, are
said to automatically LOSE.

This is what ls -l says:
-rwxr-xr-x  1 lange       24576 Dec 16 12:05 /u9/lange/alex/c/hello
-rw-r--r--  1 lange          88 Dec 16 13:59 /u9/lange/alex/c/hello.c
-rwxr-xr-x  1 lange        1335 Dec 16 14:28 /u9/lange/alex/c/hello.explained

So that's a ratio of 24576 / 88 , which we can get the
shell to evaluate for us with the shell command
expr 24576 / 88

279

which, I would say, means that Sun loses... .

[[Ed's Note: Just out of curiosity, I compiled the following program:

           main(){}

on a couple of different machines just to see what kind of executables
each produced. This program does absolutely nothing, so what we are seeing
is the size of the routines to handle passing in args and staring up. All
were compiled with cc. 

          Apollo (Domain/OS SR10.1)  2715 bytes
 	  HP-9000 (HPUX 6.5)         5114 bytes
          Sun (4.0.3 & 4.1)         24576 bytes

So that was kind of interesting, so I looked at object code output (cc -c)

          Apollo    1391 bytes
          HP-9000    103 bytes
          Sun         80 bytes (Sparcstation, 4.1)
          Sun         78 bytes (Sun 3/60, 4.0.3)

So, most of the space is taken up in the link/load process. Note that by
stripping the relocation bits (ld -s), you can reduce the size of the
executable to 16384 bytes. -bdg]]

Alex Lange                      
Publications Engineer           -  Everyone spoke of an information overload,
Lockheed Missiles & Space       -  but what there was in fact was 
lange at iscnvx.lmsc.lockheed.com  -                 a non-information overload.