[TUHS] early cc variable and function names

[lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

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