From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: rochkind@basepath.com (Marc Rochkind) Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2015 15:28:12 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] ld (was v6tar from v7 on v6, too large?) In-Reply-To: <201512102108.tBAL8ljr025838@mail.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201512102108.tBAL8ljr025838@mail.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: After a while, I shortened this in my mind to something like "the UNIX linker is called ld." No problem with that, but a few times I absent-mindedly typed "ln" for "linker", which generally produced very strange results. --Marc On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 2:08 PM, Doug McIlroy wrote: > That's exactly right. ld performs the same task as LOAD did on BESYS, > except it builds the result in the file system rather than user > space. Over time it became clear that "linker" would be a better > term, but that didn't warrant canning the old name. Gresham's law > then came into play and saddled us with the ponderous and > misleading term, "link editor". > > Doug > > > My understanding, which predates my contact with Unix, is that the > > original toochains for single-job machines consisted of the assembler > > or compiler, the output of which was loaded directly into core with > > the loader. As things became more complicated (and slow), it made > > sense to store the memory image somewhere on drum, and then load that > > image directly when you wanted to run it. And that in some systems > > the name "loader" stuck, even though it no longer loaded. Something > > like the modern ISP use of the term "modem" to mean "router". But I > > don't have anything to back up this version; comments welcome. > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org > http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tuhs > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: