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    SubjectRe: Not a typewriter
    On Sun, May 13, 2001 at 09:03:30PM -0400, Horst von Brand wrote:

    > The old C compiler/old Unix linker guaranteed 6 chars in an external symbol
    > name only, and C functions got an underscore prepended: _creat. I guess
    > this is the reason for this wart. As to why 6 chars only, I'd guess some
    > data structure in the linker was laid out that way. Machines had a few
    > dozen Kbs of RAM then, space was precious.

    I recall that RSX-11 and a few other series of early DEC operating
    systems stored linker symbols in a "RAD50" encoding scheme which
    allowed 6 chararacters to be crammed into a 32-bit "long word". I
    suspect that this is where the limitation originated.

    --
    John Kodis <kodis@acm.org>
    Phone: 301-286-7376
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