From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 19:52:42 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] early cc variable and function names
In-Reply-To: <20141017024049.GI17227@mercury.ccil.org>
References: <20141017022913.7A77818C092@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
 <20141017024049.GI17227@mercury.ccil.org>
Message-ID: <20141017025242.GH6963@mcvoy.com>

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