[TUHS] early cc variable and function names
Larry McVoy
lm at mcvoy.com
Fri Oct 17 12:52:42 AEST 2014
On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 10:40:49PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Noel Chiappa scripsit:
>
> > The a.out symbol tables use 8-character fields to hold symbol names. However,
> > C automagically and unavoidably prepends an _ to all externals (I forget
> > about automatics, registers, etc - too tired to check right now), making the
> > limit for C names 7 characters.
>
> The _ was only for externals, including all procedure names. It prevented
> collisions with names introduced into the assembly-language source or
> in libc.
This is perhaps a side note but I believe all structure fields shared a
namespace. So stat.size and whatever.size were not allowed, they collided.
So we got sb.st_size which I personally love and wish it were still like
that.
xyz.size
abc.size
foobar.size
What are the types of those structures?
abc.st_size
Huh, abc is a struct stat.
I get that it was a bug and needed to be fixed but I wish that everyone
still pretended that it was one namespace, makes code so much easier to
read.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
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