[TUHS] early cc variable and function names

[random832@fastmail.us (random832@fastmail.us)]

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.