Fwd: A little question about the history of M4

[Raphael 'kena' Poss]

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 · address@hidden
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~poss/