> There is no information about the function's prototype in the object file, so the linker can't determine that. That that information isn’t there is an implem

> There is no information about the function's prototype in the object file, so the linker can't determine that. That that information isn’t there is an implementation choice. For example, they could have hacked it in like C++ did by mangling names (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_mangling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_mangling). That probably would have required supporting longer identifiers (IIRC archives limited them to 14 characters), but that’s doable.