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Fwd: A little question about the history of M4
From: |
Raphael 'kena' Poss |
Subject: |
Fwd: A little question about the history of M4 |
Date: |
Thu, 17 Jul 2014 17:20:55 +0200 |
Daniel, all
just to underline my previous answer, a response from one of the two authors of
the original M4:
Begin doorgestuurd bericht:
> Van: Brian Kernighan <XXX>
> Datum: 17 juli 2014 17:10:46 GMT+02:00
> Aan: Raphael 'kena' Poss <address@hidden>
> Onderwerp: Antw.: A little question about the history of M4
>
> Hi --
>
> I don't know anything specific (and was not part of any
> discussions), but I think your guess is right: programs
> were small, memory was very limited (the first C compiler
> ran in something like 12K bytes), and processors were
> slow. Namespaces would have been serious overkill for
> that kind of situation.
>
> Sorry I can't give you anything more definitive.
>
> Brian
>
> On Thu, 17 Jul 2014, Raphael 'kena' Poss wrote:
>
>> Dear Brian,
>>
>> I am teaching various courses related to programming languages, their
>> features and history and a question has been popping up recently: why was
>> there little consideration for namespace isolation in the design of C, M4
>> and other programming technology from that time?
>>
>> My first guesses are that software was not yet large enough that namespacing
>> was a concrete issue, and that memory was still scarce enough that the
>> overhead of namespace support was too costly. But perhaps you have another
>> opinion?
>>
>> Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> --
>> Raphael 'kena' Poss ? address@hidden
>> http://staff.science.uva.nl/~poss/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
--
Raphael 'kena' Poss ยท address@hidden
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~poss/
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