Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ncar!noao!asuvax!stjhmc!p6.f18.n114.z1.fidonet.org!will.summers From: will.summers@p6.f18.n114.z1.fidonet.org (will summers) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: "Numerical Recipes in C" is nonport Message-ID: <703.2339B3CB@stjhmc.fidonet.org> Date: 21 Sep 88 06:44:54 GMT Sender: ufgate@stjhmc.fidonet.org (newsout1.24) Organization: FidoNet node 1:114/18.6 - Iasd Eng Bbs, Phoenix Az Lines: 49 (Re: dpANS guarentee of only 6 monocase characters of external name significance) In article <10295@bellcore.bellcore.com> sjs@jcricket.ctt.bellcore.com (Stan Switzer) writes: > Two is a couple. A few is at least three (in my book). I guess > *many* will have to be at least four. Ah... the way I heard it was two's company, three's a crowd, four's a fist fight and five's a riot. Guess we need six. :-) > "How many C implemenations are constrained by 6 character monocase > linkers and how badly are they constrained?" > 1) GECOS / GCOS / GCOS 8 > for the GE 600 / Honeywell 6000 / DPS 8 series > > Being essentially quantitative, the first part of this controversy is > easier to resolve than the second, but as of my last experience w/ > GCOS (1982), I don't feel I'd have lost very much in abandoning the > standard linker in favor of a "C" linker. I believe the committee's concern was over those installations where security prevented all but "secure" programs from generating an executable module. Does GCOS qualify? I -think- the waterloo C compiler for GCOS (single segment) recoginzes 100 case-siginificant characters in external names. I am a supporter of dpANS, but have trouble understanding this decision. Even if the implementor could not generate his own linker, it would seem that he could implement a pre-link pass that mapped longer identifiers in the .o files (or whatever). Non-dpANS .LIB files would need an associated mapping file. Maybe I just don't understand but it seems a small price for the rest of the world to enhjoy 32-bit externs. I forsee this limitation as one of the most widely ignored, even by many programmers that are otherwise careful about portability considerations. \/\/ill -- St. Joseph's Hospital/Medical Center - Usenet <=> FidoNet Gateway Uucp: ...{gatech,ames,rutgers}!ncar!noao!asuvax!stjhmc!18.6!will.summers