17 Oct
2014
17 Oct
'14
7:35 p.m.
On Thu, Oct 16, 2014, at 22:21, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Thu, 16 Oct 2014, Mark Longridge wrote:
For externals, it's a limitation of the PDP-11 a.out format. Other
systems may or may not have had the same limit or a different limit.
For VAX, 4BSD appears to use an "index into file string table", whereas
3BSD still has an 8-character string. I don't see any provision in the
4BSD linker for loading 3BSD binaries.
Filenames over 14 characters appear to have been introduced in 4.1BSD.
It seems like early cc could only use variable
and function names up to
8 characters.
In those days it took only the first seven and ignored the rest,
prepending an underscore as you discovered. I don't remember when longer
names were recognised; for all I know it could've been around when
pathnames could be longer than 14 chars (which I think may have been a
BSDism).