From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: imp@bsdimp.com (Warner Losh) Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 07:44:13 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] early cc variable and function names In-Reply-To: <1413552911.3770380.180156925.37C2AFA9@webmail.messagingengine.com> References: <1413552911.3770380.180156925.37C2AFA9@webmail.messagingengine.com> Message-ID: <1462E6EC-86F5-4FFD-8FA7-DDA756256A32@bsdimp.com> On Oct 17, 2014, at 7:35 AM, random832 at fastmail.us wrote: > 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. As someone that wrote an assembler and a linker/loader for the VAX back in the day (for my first CS class), I know that 4.2 definitely had the string table, as did all the descendants that I encountered in the field back during the great unix wars when I was instructed by my employer to obfuscate certain symbols to “protect” IP. Warner > Filenames over 14 characters appear to have been introduced in 4.1BSD. > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 842 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: