[TUHS] early cc variable and function names
random832 at fastmail.us
random832 at fastmail.us
Fri Oct 17 23:35:11 AEST 2014
On Thu, Oct 16, 2014, at 22:21, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Oct 2014, Mark Longridge wrote:
>
> > It seems like early cc could only use variable and function names up to
> > 8 characters.
>
> In those days it took only the first seven and ignored the rest,
> prepending an underscore as you discovered. I don't remember when longer
> names were recognised; for all I know it could've been around when
> pathnames could be longer than 14 chars (which I think may have been a
> BSDism).
For externals, it's a limitation of the PDP-11 a.out format. Other
systems may or may not have had the same limit or a different limit.
For VAX, 4BSD appears to use an "index into file string table", whereas
3BSD still has an 8-character string. I don't see any provision in the
4BSD linker for loading 3BSD binaries.
Filenames over 14 characters appear to have been introduced in 4.1BSD.
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