Re: Not a typewriter

[Jesse Pollard <pollard@tomcat.admin.navo.hpc.mil>]

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> 
> > IIRC, the 6 character linker requirement came from when the Bell Labs folk
> > ported the C compiler the IBM mainframe world, not from the early UNIX (tm)
> > world.  During the original ANSI C meetings, I got the sense from the IBM rep,
> 
> 6 character linker name limits are very old. Honeywell L66 GCOS3/TSS which I
> had the dubious pleasure of experiencing and which is a direct derivative of
> GECOS and thus relevant to the era like many 36bit boxes uses 6 char link names
> 
> Why - well because 6 BCD characters fit in a 36bit word and its a single compare
> to check symbol matches

well... actually it was 6 bit "ascii" computed from: (char - ' '). Depends
entirely on architecture, and implementation. EBCD/6Bit/7Bit and EBCDIC were
supported on the Honeywell systems.

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Jesse I Pollard, II
Email: pollard@navo.hpc.mil

Any opinions expressed are solely my own.