The free() thing and function names

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1989Sep15.202109.4888 at twwells.com> bill at twwells.com (T. William Wells) writes:
>BTW, I too am not very happy about this: it effectively adds a whole
>bunch of keywords to the language. Some of which one has no reason to
>know exists. Well, it is much too late, and I haven't a suggestion to
>fix it; I thought I did, but on further inspection, discovered a
>fatal flaw. So now I'll just grumble about this language deficiency
>and learn to live with it.

It would have been trivial for the Standard to have "fixed" this;
all standard library functions could have been given names starting
with an underscore, for example.  I personally would have preferred
that, along with reengineering the specs for many of the functions.
Suggestions along these lines were made, but it was deemed outside
X3J11's charter (namely, to standardize existing practice).