23 Feb
2012
23 Feb
'12
1:17 a.m.
Hi All.
This is interesting. It shows that (apparently) early on, assembler was
viewed as the primary programming language.
It also shows the consequences a small, apparently local decision can have:
here we are 40+ years later and GCC on Windows is still preprending
underscores to function names!
In 15 minutes I helped the guy at work solve a problem he'd been working
on for two days!
Thanks everyone,
Arnold
From: Brantley Coile <brantley(a)coraid.com>
To: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:34:26 -0600
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs(a)tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] why the leading under score added to function names?
correct. we could link to assembler code with _entry points and not
i> worry
about symbol collisions in the rest of the code.
iPhone email
On Feb 20, 2012, at 6:23 PM, "Dave Horsfall" <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Feb 2012, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> I'm pretty sure this dates back to PDP-11 days. I'm wondering
"why?".
>> Why did the C compiler prepend an underscore to function names?
>
> Sure was the PDP-11 :-) I vaguely recall that it was to make sure that
> user functions did not conflict with predefined assembler functions, as
> that would be a pain to diagnose (much like having swap overlap root).
>
> -- Dave