The phenomenon of 'quiet truncation' may be vicious or benign, depending upon context, i.e., upon whose ox is being gored.
The current C standard permits non-external identifiers to be very long, but it then employs Leibniz's ontologocal principle of the iderntity of indiscernibles in an oddly creative way. If two identifiers do not differ in their first 31 characters they are treated as the same. The two identifiers an_example_of_a_long_identifier_1 an_example_of_a_long_identifier_2 are thus, because indiscernible, identical. The standard then goes on to permit implementations of C to support longer identifiers, to put the threshold of indiscernibility at, say, 63 characters. This is generous, but it threatens such portability as C makes available. In general,. while it would certainly be possible, even easy, to construct a less satisfactory rule, this one is already quite objectionable enough. ---jg ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
