IEEE 1003.2

[Andrew Hume]

Rob, before badmouthing other people's ideas, check your facts.
Many Unixes (BSD, System V, ...) have symbol tables for their object archives,
the same thing could be done for directories. Even a simple-minded ld
could arrange things to remember the symbol table from each .o it looks
at and thus read each .o at most twice.

as one might say, as obvious as the nose on your face.