From: ron@ronnatalie.com (Ron Natalie)
Subject: [TUHS] early cc variable and function names
Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 19:03:21 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <C23D45B6-2397-47D0-B1A7-04F989B37608@ronnatalie.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20141018103221.204F418C089@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
The assembler could handle 8 case independent symbols. C prepended an underscore to avoid any symbol conflicts. If I recall the compiler allowed longer symbols but it just lost those letters after 7.
Amusingly an early IBM 370 compiler omitted prepending the underscore which lead to hilarity when you declared variables called things like R15.
On Oct 18, 2014, at 6:32 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>> From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com>
>
>> This is really an identifier issues
>
> Probably actually a function of the relocatable object format / linker on the
> machines in question, which in most (all?) cases predated C itself.
>
>> it's documented in K&R 1st edition, page 179:
>
> Oooh, good piece of detective work!
>
> Noel
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> TUHS mailing list
> TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2014-10-18 23:03 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 21+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-10-18 10:32 Noel Chiappa
2014-10-18 23:03 ` Ron Natalie [this message]
2014-10-18 23:11 ` Dave Horsfall
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2014-10-17 16:11 Noel Chiappa
2014-10-17 2:29 Noel Chiappa
2014-10-17 2:40 ` John Cowan
2014-10-17 2:52 ` Larry McVoy
2014-10-17 3:46 ` John Cowan
2014-10-17 3:54 ` Larry McVoy
2014-10-17 19:41 ` Clem Cole
2014-10-17 20:37 ` random832
2014-10-17 20:42 ` Larry McVoy
2014-10-17 1:51 Mark Longridge
2014-10-17 2:20 ` Milo Velimirovic
2014-10-17 2:21 ` Dave Horsfall
2014-10-17 13:35 ` random832
2014-10-17 13:44 ` Warner Losh
2014-10-17 14:07 ` arnold
2014-10-17 14:22 ` Milo Velimirović
2014-10-17 19:29 ` random832
2014-10-18 7:25 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
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