Reserved names in ANSI C

[Norman Diamond]

In article <1989Jun21.090428.9636 at twwells.com> bill at twwells.com (T. William Wells) writes:

>	is[a-z].*       externals, ctype.h

Geez.  Last time I wrote a C program, guess how I named all my boolean
predicates.  There's a lesson here:  on those rare occasions when Unix
provides an example of good style, don't you dare learn from it.

(Partially thanks to Global Engineering Documents, who refused to sell
a public review copy of the draft standard.)

>Can you say "name space pollution"?

Yup.  Maybe, in order to standardize existing practice, no user-defined
identifiers may start with an alphabetic.  They must ALL start with an
underscore followed by a lower-case letter.

--
Norman Diamond, Sony Computer Science Lab (diamond%csl.sony.jp at relay.cs.net)
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