kendall@wjh12.UUCP (Sam Kendall) (10/13/84)
Several articles have objected to the 6-character external identifier limit thinking that it is an absolute limit on compilers. > I think you should definetly have the standard allow long external variable > names. Limiting them to 6 characters would have a number of bad effects: > ... > 2) Compiler writers would *not* follow the standard. The problem with > this is that everyone will violate it in a different way. Some > compilers will support 31 char limits, some 64, some 255. In other > words, the standard will not be used and would therefore be a > failure. Luckily, it's not quite as bad as that. The ANSI C standard, unlike the Ada standard, will allow extensions. The standard is simply to specify what a program must be like if it hopes to be 100% portable; implementors are not discouraged from adding to the language they compile. (And on the 6-character issue, since System V Release 2 and 4.2bsd both support indefinite-length identifiers and will presumably continue to do so, programs can be somewhat portable even if they use big names.) Sam Kendall {allegra,ihnp4,ima,amd}!wjh12!kendall Delft Consulting Corp. decvax!genrad!wjh12!kendall