From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: cowan@mercury.ccil.org (John Cowan)
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 22:40:49 -0400
Subject: [TUHS] early cc variable and function names
In-Reply-To: <20141017022913.7A77818C092@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
References: <20141017022913.7A77818C092@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <20141017024049.GI17227@mercury.ccil.org>

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.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
A male Jang appeared at my side.  "Get a grip on yourself," he said.
"Get a grip on your graks," I suggested.  --Tanith Lee, Drinking Sapphire Wine