I’ve been told this, and couldn’t find a confirmation or rebuttal on the web. Is this true? If so, which is the limit? Is it usually enforced by compilers?
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I’ve been told this, and couldn’t find a confirmation or rebuttal on the web. Is this true? If so, which is the limit? Is it usually enforced by compilers?
ANSI C doesn’t concern itself with that kind of thing.
There is nothing in §5 Environment in the C99 standard that even talks about “loading a program in memory”.
The only considerations are what the environment must provide to be conforming with the abstract state machine that is the basis for the language/standard. That doesn’t require “loading a program in memory” – code could be spooled from a deck of punch cards.
There are limits expressed on character sets, the source code size and complexity and a few other things – but those are mostly lower bounds that a conforming implementation must accept, and relate to the translation environment, not the execution environment.