Re: Symbol tables and scopes

In article <06-02-162@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
David R Tribble <david@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It certainly helped that COBOL allowed for names up to 30 characters
long. How long did it take other languages (FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal,
C) to get to this point?

C has always permitted long names, but of course, the question is how many
characters are *significant*. The earliest compilers typically supported
only 8 significant characters. ANSI C required internal names to have at
least 31 significant characters; that was official in 1989, but probably
ought to be dated a bit earlier for historical purposes because the
standard took a while to finish and compiler writers knew this change was
coming. Extending this to external names required waiting until some of
the worst old linkers died; that became official in 1999.
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