| Richard Maine 2004-06-25, 7:43 pm |
| "James Giles" <jamesgiles@worldnet.att.net> writes:
> As you say, linking (loading - why the change in traditional
> terminology?)...
You mentioned that terminology question before. but I'm not
sure that the terminology has changed.
My early memories recall IBM mainframes having two separate things, a
linker and a loader. I don't recall the exact names. (Something like
linkage editor perhaps instead of linker?). Seems to me that what I
recall the linker (or linkage editor) from then doing is much like
what we now call linking.
Though I guess I also recall the name "loader" on other machines,
as with CDC's segloader, but that terminology is newer than IBM's,
so I'm not sure it has as good a claim to being "traditional".
Being a youth of a mere 52 years, I wasn't programming much in
the 50's or even most of the 60's, so I guess I can't claim
much direct exposure to "traditional" terminology.
I would say that the term "link" makes more sense to me for this
operation. The "interesting" parts involve connecting the links
between the parts. The linker doesn't actually load the program
into memory - that would be the loader (which us programmers
normally don't have to deal very directly with, as it doesn't have
as many issues that matter to us).
--
Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience;
email: my first.last at org.domain | experience comes from bad judgment.
org: nasa, domain: gov | -- Mark Twain
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