From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: cubexyz@gmail.com (Mark Longridge)
Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 21:51:56 -0400
Subject: [TUHS] early cc variable and function names
Message-ID: <CADxT5N4x_q8zreY_ky7SwNn2OqK07OnqO+uUAm_pRfALo-5iZA@mail.gmail.com>

Hi folks,

I've been looking at Unix v5 cc limitations.

It seems like early cc could only use variable and function names up
to 8 characters.

This limitation occurs in v5, v6 and v7.

But when using the nm utility to print out the name list I see
function test1234() listed as:
000044T _test123

That seems to suggest that only the first 7 characters are
significant, but when looking at other sources they stated that one
can use up to 8 characters.

I hacked up a short program to test this:

main()
{
        test1234();
        test1235();
}

test1234()
{
        printf ("\nWorking");
}

test1235()
{
        printf ("\nAlso working");
}


This generated:
Multiply defined: test5.o;_test123

So it would seem that function names can only be 7 characters in
length. I am not sure if limitations of early cc were documented
anywhere. When I backported unirubik to v5 it compiled the longer
functions without any problem.

Did anyone document these sorts of limitations of early cc? Does
anyone remember when cc started to use function names longer than 7
characters?

Mark