19 Oct
2014
19 Oct
'14
5:03 a.m.
The assembler could handle 8 case independent symbols. C prepended an underscore to
avoid any symbol conflicts. If I recall the compiler allowed longer symbols but it just
lost those letters after 7.
Amusingly an early IBM 370 compiler omitted prepending the underscore which lead to
hilarity when you declared variables called things like R15.
On Oct 18, 2014, at 6:32 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
From: Greg
'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com>
This is really an identifier issues
Probably actually a function of the relocatable object format / linker on the
machines in question, which in most (all?) cases predated C itself.
it's documented in K&R 1st edition, page
179:
Oooh, good piece of detective work!
Noel
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