Prototypes (was Re: OK, so why _does_ ld resolve text against data?)

[Peter Blemel]

It has been noted that the linker *should* resolve symbols to local code before
resolving them from a library. Two problems arise from this assumption in my
personal experience:

1) 	I decided to rewrite a function, but I changed the order of the arguments:
	If the system I am porting to has ansi prototypes the compiler will bomb
	on the code declaring that my arguments are incorrect.
	
	I had used index as a global int within a file (properly declaring it, and
	referencing it), but when I tried to port the code to a machine with 
	prototypes, the compiler choked on my use of index because of the
	prototype definition, effectively making index a reserved word. Should
	functions in the standard c library be forced as reserved words?

2)	In an even worse oversight, Apollo has implimented shared libraries
	including the lex library libl.a. My application needed a very large
	yytext[] array, so I declared it myself and the Sun/VAX/IBM linkers
	correctly used my array because I do not include -ll in the arguments
	to ld. The Apollo linker automagically loads all of the shared libraries,
	so that even though I do *not* specify -ll at link time, it is still
	loaded and a multiply defined symbol yytext is produced. My code (under
	these conditions) can not be ported without a rewrite becuase I need the
	expanded yytext buffer.

Peter Blemel
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