[help-3dldf] Re: variables in yyparse

[Hans Aberg]

On 2004/12/21 12:12, Laurence Finston at address@hidden wrote:

>> What is "bss"?
> 
> When I type `size 3dldf' on the Linux system I'm using, the following is
> printed to `stdout':
> 
> text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
> 3693037    1376    6708 3701121  387981 3dldf
> 
> If I'd ever looked at this closely before, I would have noticed how small
> the `bss' section is.  I once read what `bss' stands for, but I don't
> remember what.  I think Stevens explains it in _Advanced Programming in
> the UNIX Environment_.  In the "good old days", it contained
> "uninitialized" data, i.e., data initialized to 0, as someone pointed
> out recently, the stack and the heap, one of which grew upward, the other
> downward.

The UNIX environment BSD has a manpage a.out.0 with the informative:
    Nobody seems to agree on what bss stands for.

In Maurice J. Bach, "The design of the UNIX operative system", the footnote
on p.25 says:
  The name bss comes from an assembly pseudo-operator on the IBM 7090
  machine, which stood for "block started by symbol".

  Hans Aberg