On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, Jerry Feldman wrote: =>I think you are correct. Create(2) is a system call. Linkage editors those =>days were rather primitive. I think the name limit was either 7 or 8, but =>external names in C were many times autoprefixed with __, such that creat =>became __creat. =>The C language had a limit of 8 characters for a variable name (K&R 2.1). =>(Actually a name could be longer, but only the first 8 were significant). =>I think the only other programmer on this list who might have been writing =>C back then is my granduncle, Alex Hewitt ;-) => =>On 20 Aug 2002 at 16:43, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: =>> I believe it was Ken Thompson, and I believe the remark was intended to be =>> humorous. Step back and ask: Why would he spell "create" as "creat" in the =>> first place? If you are going to type five characters, you might as well =>> type six. The reason it was spelled "creat" in the first place was the =>> linked only supported five characters. That has caused much =>> head-scratching, question-asking, and recompiling-due-to-typos; hence the =>> remark about the spelling.
I have to jump in with an old arcana of my own. I used to work at Data General during Soul of a New Machine days. Their AOS operating system actually had roots originating from earliest Unix. The deal there was that all external variables (by convention) were coded in uppercase. Why? Because sometimes we needed to assign values at linktime to symbols. This was done on the commandline. And the Data General Command Line Interface (CLI) was case insensitive. So if the symbol wasn't uppercase, then the linker would be monkeying with the wrong symbol. :-) -- -Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have - -happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ -Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- -individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question? [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
