pre#defines for system and machine (was: RMS comments to X3J11)

[Alan J Rosenthal]

In article <5497 at brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
>For example, the machine I'm preparing this response on would
>predefine _sys_bsd43 and _mach_vax.

Why _sys_bsd43 and not _sys_bsd but _mach_vax but not _mach_vax8600 (or
whatever)?

In current environments, often more things are predefined than just a machine
name and a system name.  Is there some way to specify that all larger groups
of machines or systems that this is a component of should be defined?  For
example, there should be a full system name (bsd43), a system name missing
any version number (bsd), and a generic system name (unix).  The same could
apply to machine names, of course.

This still doesn't take care of things like UOFX_THINGGROUP.  How common is
this sort of thing (other groupings for conditional compilation besides
systems and hardware)?  Perhaps there should also be _group or _misc or
something?

Also, why lower case as opposed to the standard of caps for constants?

ajr