Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!gatech!uflorida!haven!ncifcrf!nlm-mcs!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: "Numerical Recipes in C" is nonport
Message-ID: <8569@smoke.ARPA>
Date: 23 Sep 88 21:52:10 GMT
References: <703.2339B3CB@stjhmc.fidonet.org>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) )
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 18

In article <703.2339B3CB@stjhmc.fidonet.org> will.summers@p6.f18.n114.z1.fidonet.org (will summers) writes:
>but it seems a small price for the rest of the world to enhjoy 32-bit
>externs.                                 

Nothing is stopping the rest of the world from enjoying 32-bit externs.
A little (very little) information theory will show that this cannot
be guaranteed by any amount of trickery in a 6-character extern
environment, if one does not have control over the linker etc.

The proposed ANS for C does NOT repeat NOT prohibit implementations
from supporting more than 6 monocase characters of significance in
external identifiers.

>I forsee this limitation as one of the most widely ignored, even by 
>many programmers that are otherwise careful about portability 
>considerations.

It's already ignored, and already causes problems.