length of external names

Paul Schauble Schauble at MIT-MULTICS.ARPA
Wed Jan 9 13:39:23 AEST 1985


One other comment on the hashing technique:  When I made the original
posting I assumed the linker model I was most familiar with:  one
external definition and a series of references.  For this model, having
two C symbols that hash to the same external is not very much of a
problem.  The linker will see two different definitions of its symbol
and should complain.

The numbers given also assumed the shortest linker name space I was
aware of, 30 bits.  For anything larger (GCOS, 36 bits, MS-DOS, 64
bits), the probability of collision is too small to compute on the
equipment I have at hand.

          Paul



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