August Karlstrom said:
Quote:
Richard Heathfield wrote:
[...]
Quote:
>In C90, an implementation must be able to distinguish between external
>identifiers that are unique in the first 6 characters (without regard to
>case!). A program such as the one required in Exercise 6-2 could be
>useful for diagnosing source code that ignores this limit (as I suspect
>a vast amount of source code does).
>
So a library which exports e.g. the identifiers string_prepend and
string_append are not really C90 compliant?
Right, for two reasons:
(1) the names invade implementation namespace;
(2) the names are a touch on the long side.
In practice, (1) is often ignored, and (2) is practically always ignored.
But strictly speaking, yes, you are correct.
Of the two reasons, (1) is probably the more important. Whilst it is
certainly possible that some people are still using 6-sig-char linkers
nowadays, it isn't terribly likely that terribly many people are. Even
twenty years ago (and probably more), people were ignoring the 6-character
thing, and it doesn't seem to have caused any major software crises.
--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
