Re: conservative static region allocator...

"Bartc" <bartc@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

"Walter Banks" <walter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:49B8365A.165EBD7B@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Richard Heathfield wrote:

When a programming language designer allows you to do something a
small number of times (but more than once), that's unreasonable. In
C's case, the obvious candidate is the six-unique-characters
limitation in C90 linkers, and this is a flaw not so much of C as
of ISO.

Its origins go back to early tool sets. The Honeywell 6000 stored
6 characters in a 36 bit word later 4 9 bit chars in the same word.
PDP 8's stored two characters in 12 bit words and some PDP11
linkers which had a 6 character limit in external symbols. The linker
had 40 symbols in the supported character set and could encode
6 characters in 2 16 bit numbers.

I remember the use of 'sixbit' on the 36-bit pdp10, giving 6
upper-case characters per word. And this seemed to pervade everything
including filenames and program variables.

Far from being a limitation, it made some text processing (and
compiler work in my case) easy and very efficient. Made easier by the
users at the time accepting the six-character limit on names.

Come off it Bart, of course it was a limitation. The "efficiency" offset
by the obvious limitations imposed by striving to get a meaningful name
into 6 characters.

--
You can’t prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It’s really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar.
.

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