Re: Symbol tables and scopes

henry@spsystems.net (Henry Spencer)
5 Mar 2006 02:17:59 -0500

          From comp.compilers
Related articles
[17 earlier articles]
Re: Symbol tables and scopes alexc@TheWorld.com (Alex Colvin) (2006-02-17)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes david@tribble.com (David R Tribble) (2006-02-24)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes david@tribble.com (David R Tribble) (2006-02-24)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes david@tribble.com (David R Tribble) (2006-02-24)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes david@tribble.com (David R Tribble) (2006-02-24)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes DrDiettrich@compuserve.de (Hans-Peter Diettrich) (2006-03-05)
Re: Symbol tables and scopes henry@spsystems.net (2006-03-05)
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From: henry@spsystems.net (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 5 Mar 2006 02:17:59 -0500
Organization: SP Systems, Toronto, Canada
References: 06-01-101 06-02-049 06-02-095 06-02-162
Keywords: Cobol, symbols
Posted-Date: 05 Mar 2006 02:17:59 EST

In article 06-02-162,
David R Tribble <david@tribble.com> wrote:
>It certainly helped that COBOL allowed for names up to 30 characters
>long. How long did it take other languages (FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal,
>C) to get to this point?


C has always permitted long names, but of course, the question is how many
characters are *significant*. The earliest compilers typically supported
only 8 significant characters. ANSI C required internal names to have at
least 31 significant characters; that was official in 1989, but probably
ought to be dated a bit earlier for historical purposes because the
standard took a while to finish and compiler writers knew this change was
coming. Extending this to external names required waiting until some of
the worst old linkers died; that became official in 1999.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
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