[Ecls-list] Critical change

[Jyrki Jaakkola]

Hi!

Erik Huelsmann wrote:
> On 1/18/07, Juan Jose Garcia-Ripoll <jjgarcia at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>> I do not know. It is not a difficult change, but it will make much of
>> the code almost illegible. Also, some of the names have probably close
>> to 32 characters, which is the limit of some compilers around. I
>> wonder whether we will have problems any time soon.
> 
> There are compilers with that limit? I work on the Subversion project
> and we prefix all symbols with 'svn_(subcomponent)_' where
> subcomponent can count upto 7 characters ('ra_dav_'). We've never
> heard of a limit like that (and as a matter of fact, we're exceeding
> it in a lot of places!).
> 
> Yes, it is sometimes troublesome to read the sources, but it's nice to
> be sure to know symbol collisions will be extremely rare.

Most older compilers has this limit but I haven't checked how it's with 
newer compilers. As far as I know even those which had the limit would 
have accepted longer names but when considering if two names are equal 
they cut to that length and then compared those shorter versions. So it 
could happen that although two different names wouldn't normally clash 
they would clash because of this.

Jyrki Jaakkola