Rick Stevens wrote:
On Wed, 2007-05-30 at 14:31 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote:
[snip]
As far as the libraries are concerned, the initial draft of what was in the standard C library made the library so damned big that it wouldn't fit in the standard process memory footprint of a VAX at the time.Care to substantiate that? As far as the Standard is concerned, it does not address packaging issues.I'm talking about the very, very early days of discussing just what goes in the libraries--and indeed how many libraries there were going to be.
Ok. Your use of the term "standard C library" is somewhat irregular, then. That term now has a specific defined meaning. But if that is what you meant, then fine.
The working document we had put almost everything in a single library. When we implemented it as a test case on the two most common systems we had (a PDP-11 and a VAX), the linker couldn't handle the library size. Indeed, without segmenting the program and using overlays, the famous "hello world" program couldn't fit on a VAX. Overlays worked, but it was spectacularly slow.
One of the first C implementations I used was one on the IBM PC for PCDOS, with a limit of 64K total code+data. Ever try using overlays on a two-floppy system? I have. Grrr, grrr, grrr, was a sound which frequently came not only from the floppy disc drives, but from other sources as well :-) [snip]
As I said, I wasn't there at the end. The money was an issue, but alsomany of the meetings simply degenerated into finger-pointing sessions. As Charles Shultz once stated in "Peanuts": "Beneath the calm exteriorlurk the dynamics of a nursery school recess." All in all, C is a great language, but it does have warts. It's a giraffe...a horse designed by a committee.
Plauger and I exchanged a few e-mails during that period, and
he made comments of a similar nature. I got to meet him over
on comp.lang.c 'way back. I'm sure he doesn't remember me, though.
[snip]
Mike
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