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Now I'm thinking about how the ASR33 teletype doesn't have a way to type [] brackets nor {} brackets... And also if you send it ASCII underscore _, that gets displayed as an arrow pointing to the left ←...
Don't remember where I read that, but supposedly by the type C and UNIX were being made, they had upgraded to Model 38 teletypes, which do have a way to type "all 128 ASCII characters" according to the manual
Notice the positions of [] and {}, that seems inconvenient to me, but maybe it's just because of habit...
That same... article? blog post?... may have also said that how _ gets printed as ← on the ASR33 is a reason why early UNIX code avoids underscores (it also avoids camelCase; note that the ASR33 is case-insensitive) and tries to just make the variable name short enough that none of it is needed
Though also: Didn't early C compilers have a length limit on identifiers that was just 8 characters or so?
@vaporeon_ 6 significant initial characters for external identifiers as of ANSI C (case sensitivity not required)! 31 and case sensitivity for internal identifiers, including macro names.
@alyssa I somehow wasn't aware that ANSI C still had this limitation... So if I'm writing a library in C (targeting older systems that do not have any newer versions of C), I should make sure that every external symbol has distinct 6 characters at the start?
@vaporeon_ notionally, at least. probably in practice many actual implementations guaranteed more than that but i have no idea.
C99 increased it to 31 for external identifiers (63 for internal) and i think guaranteed case sensitivity, so you don't need super recent to have it guaranteed (and probably most or all implementations had less constrained limits by then anyway)
