Re: Not a typewriter

Jesse Pollard
2001-05-14T17:30:47Z

--------- Received message begins Here ---------

>
> > 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.

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

Any opinions expressed are solely my own.