Tanks Ron - that makes sense.

As I said, there were functions like that in other languages, plus their was beginning to be a number of library toolkits for C that people were cons-ing up in that timeframe --> particularly by stripping helper routines from other programs.   Horton & Joy's termcap and eventually curses came to live that way.

I just did a little searching of my own code archives and sure enough I found a file called support.c that has the functions len, copy and comp in it, which I must have used pre-V7  {code's ugly too - so it was clearly early C for me - I was still fighting the one-true-brace-style having come over from SAIL, Algol and BLISS}.

Clem