guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (04/08/90)
>I think liba.a didn't survive past Sixth Edition UNIX (circa 1976),
As I remember, you're right.
For those of you who are wondering "what the hell is 'liba.a'?", it was,
as I remember, a library of routines usable from assembler-language
programs (hence the "a" in "liba", just as with the "c" in "libc").
Back in the V6 days, there was still a fair bit of assembler code in
UNIX utilities (the original V6 "ar" was, as I remember, assembler code,
as was the original V6 "nroff", and I think some other stuff like the
"mkdir" command).richard@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) (04/11/90)
In article <3142@auspex.auspex.com> guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes: >For those of you who are wondering "what the hell is 'liba.a'?", it was, >as I remember, a library of routines usable from assembler-language >programs (hence the "a" in "liba", just as with the "c" in "libc"). And in particular (according to cc(I) in the Sixth Edition manual) it contained assembler routines used by C routines in libc.a. -- Richard -- Richard Tobin, JANET: R.Tobin@uk.ac.ed AI Applications Institute, ARPA: R.Tobin%uk.ac.ed@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Edinburgh University. UUCP: ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!R.Tobin
Makey@Logicon.COM (Jeff Makey) (04/11/90)
In article <3142@auspex.auspex.com> guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes: >>I think liba.a didn't survive past Sixth Edition UNIX (circa 1976), > >As I remember, you're right. Close, but no cigar. PWB (Programmer's Workbench) UNIX, a 1978 vintage that was an incremental improvement on Sixth Edition, still used the liba.a library. Still, I haven't seen it since and there seems to be no reason for modern versions of ld to support it. :: Jeff Makey Department of Tautological Pleonasms and Superfluous Redundancies Department Disclaimer: All opinions are strictly those of the author. Internet: Makey@Logicon.COM UUCP: {nosc,ucsd}!logicon.com!Makey