Re: Not a typewriter

Alan Cox
2001-05-14T17:10:17Z

> 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