external names

[Geoff Kuenning]

In article <6952 at brl-tgr.ARPA> cottrell at nbs-vms.ARPA writes:

>everyone is ignoring the obvious workable portable solution: have an
>assembly language file that looks like this:
>
>_sys_read:	jmp	SYS$SYSTEM
>_foo:		jmp	VMS$STUPIDNAME
>		.end

Portable?  What about the cdc 6600, which uses either "EQ" or "JP" for the
unconditional jump?  (No, I'm not kidding; "EQ abc" jumps to abc after
comparing register B0 with itself).

Besides, unless your "ctags" is a lot better than mine, in a large program
it is going to be a neat trick for an outside observer to figure out that
a call to "foo" actually runs LIB$DO_COMMAND.

The whole point of the original suggestion was to get AWAY from this sort of
thing and let us write what we mean, rather than kludging around things like
we do now.
-- 

	Geoff Kuenning
	...!ihnp4!trwrb!desint!geoff