[e-lang] Etymology of "Miranda invocation"

[David Hopwood]

Mark Miller wrote:
> On 8/13/07, Valerio Bellizzomi <devbox at selnet.org> wrote:
>> Thanks Mark. The E wiki is readable easily.
> 
> Not my doing. Thanks to everyone who contributed.
> 
>> Is there any documentation of the Miranda protocol in ANSI C / BitC ?
> 
> I may have created a bit of confusion here. ANSI C refers to something
> like "Miranda prototypes" or something. If I remember correctly, this
> means that functions that are defined without a prior prototype
> declaration act as if a default prototype had been declared for them.
> ("Prototype" here has nothing to do with objects. It's just a weird
> name for declaring a function's type signature.)

For those interested in the etymology of computer jargon, the earliest
on-line reference I can find for this is a 1988 post to comp.lang.c:

<http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.lang.c/browse_thread/thread/55358fd0ff097a74/fa7d72363d973b6a?lnk=st&q=%22Miranda+prototype%22&rnum=3&hl=en#fa7d72363d973b6a>

According to Chris Gray in
<http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.sys.amiga.programmer/browse_thread/thread/7763b71c9161254d/d35c018e88ef7fbd?lnk=st&q=%22Miranda+prototype%22&rnum=5&hl=en#d35c018e88ef7fbd>

# Early ANSI drafts had the notion of a Miranda prototype (if you do not
# have one, one will be provided for you), which were built up by the
# compiler based on what it could deduce from existing calls of a function
# for which it had no prototype. This was then used to check subsequent
# calls, and also checked against a true prototype or old-style definition
# if one was encountered. The notion seems to have been dropped from the
# final spec. I kind-of liked the idea, since it allowed the compiler to
# do a lot of lint-like checking. It was a bit of a pain to implement,
# however.

Indeed, this term was not used in the final C89 and later C standards.

-- 
David Hopwood <david.hopwood at industrial-designers.co.uk>