Re: OT: Requesting C advice

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 also

many of the meetings simply degenerated into finger-pointing sessions. As Charles Shultz once stated in "Peanuts": "Beneath the calm exterior

lurk 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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