From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: random832@fastmail.us (random832@fastmail.us) Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 09:35:11 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] early cc variable and function names In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <1413552911.3770380.180156925.37C2AFA9@webmail.messagingengine.com> 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.