From: Anthony Martin <ality@pbrane.org>
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: crt0 -- what's in that name?
Date: Mon, 12 Jun 2023 14:28:09 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <ZIeN6SWME8Y1pQBO@alice> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <F3D3DD69-09F1-4A06-90A6-3459C63B92F9@mac.com>
Chris Pinnock via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> once said:
> > On 12 Jun 2023, at 21:22, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I thought it was pretty well known that it stands for, "Block Started
> > (by) Symbol”?
>
> I wrote a paper on a.out a year or so ago and
> concluded that I could not find an adequate answer
> - so avoided the issue with a non-commital
> footnote.
Your paper says there are disagreements about what
it stands for. What gave you that impression?
From https://www.tuhs.org/Usenet/comp.unix.wizards/1990-June/033811.html
Dennis Ritchie says:
Actually the acronym (in the sense we took it up;
it may have other credible etymologies) is "Block
Started by Symbol." It was a pseudo-op in FAP
(Fortran Assembly [-er?] Program), an assembler
for the IBM 704-709-7090-7094 machines. It defined
its label and set aside space for a given number
of words. There was another pseudo-op, BES, "Block
Ended by Symbol" that did the same except that the
label was defined by the last assigned word + 1.
(On these machines Fortran arrays were stored
backwards in storage and were 1-origin.)
The usage is reasonably appropriate, because just
as with standard Unix loaders, the space assigned
didn't have to be punched literally into the
object deck but was represented by a count
somewhere.
Cheers,
Anthony
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-06-12 21:28 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 27+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-06-12 18:22 [TUHS] " ron minnich
2023-06-12 18:29 ` [TUHS] " Dan Cross
2023-06-12 18:53 ` Clem Cole
2023-06-12 19:45 ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-06-12 20:03 ` Chris Pinnock via TUHS
2023-06-12 20:22 ` Dan Cross
2023-06-12 20:28 ` Chris Pinnock via TUHS
2023-06-12 20:58 ` Paul Winalski
2023-06-12 21:32 ` segaloco via TUHS
2023-06-12 21:28 ` Anthony Martin [this message]
2023-06-12 20:25 ` Steve Nickolas
2023-06-12 20:17 ` Dave Horsfall
2023-06-12 21:31 ` Clem Cole
2023-06-12 21:39 ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-06-12 22:39 ` Clem Cole
2023-06-12 22:50 ` G. Branden Robinson
2023-06-12 23:04 ` Paul Winalski
[not found] ` <20230612234953.pwu7oi6hyglsaqzs@illithid>
[not found] ` <CABH=_VTv1g76MnHQpkOPXRu9WFe2Kc8qchJbAgTCMpv0bFzUrQ@mail.gmail.com>
2023-06-14 1:59 ` [TUHS] Re: [COFF] " Adam Thornton
2023-06-12 22:09 ` [TUHS] " Paul Winalski
2023-06-13 5:28 ` Dave Horsfall
2023-06-13 16:37 ` ron minnich
2023-06-13 0:46 Douglas McIlroy
2023-06-13 1:37 Norman Wilson
2023-06-13 1:41 ` Rob Pike
2023-06-13 1:48 ` Dan Cross
2023-06-13 10:03 Rudi Blom
2023-06-13 12:10 Douglas McIlroy
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