geoff (04/29/83)
The v7 C compiler does not complain about definitions of external identifiers that are not unique in their first 7 characters. The assembler does complain, giving slightly cryptic `m' diagnostics. Since many users never use the assembler directly, one would like the C compiler to diagnose this problem within a single source file. For conflicts across source files, the loader will complain quite clearly. A recent net.sources program contained code like char *format_a = "a"; char *format_b = "b"; char *format_c = "c"; These are all truncated to `format_' by the compiler, but it fails to notice that they are identical after truncation. Geoff Collyer, U. of Toronto