RMS comments to X3J11 (LONG)

[#Bill.Stewart]

<Richard Stallman submitted a long commentary on the current ANSI C
draft standard.  Doug Gwyn replied.>
One of the topics of discussion was the standards's disparagement of
the practice of #define constants for machine names not starting with _.
(This results in variable names like "sun" getting trashed into "1".)
Doug's suggestion was to have such constants start with _sys_ and _mach_,
e.g. _sys_43bsd or _mach_vax.  As an alternative, why not let
_sys_ and _machine_ be preprocessor variables, leading to
	#define	_sys_	SysVR2
	#define	_machine_	u3b2
and
	#if _machine_ = vax
instead of
	#ifdef _mach_vax

-- 
# Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G-202, Holmdel NJ 1-201-949-0705 ihnp4!ho95c!wcs