What namespaces are available?
Chuck Karish
karish at forel.stanford.edu
Sun Mar 12 08:13:55 AEST 1989
In article <535 at garcon.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdaniel at uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu
(Tim McDaniel) wrote:
>In article <11982 at haddock.ima.isc.com> karl at haddock.ima.isc.com
(Karl Heuer) writes:
>> _[a-z0-9][_A-Za-z0-9]* what I called semi-reserved
>I finally located a reference in K&R 2nd edition (p. 241):
> External identifiers that begin with an underscore are reserved
> for use by the library, as are all other identifiers that begin
> with an underscore and an upper-case letter or another underscore.
>So, were K&R simplifying the issue, or did X3J11 change its mind after
>K&R2 was published, or what? (Note that I exclude the possibility of
>Karl being wrong. 8-)
Karl's right about the existence of a special class of names.
These names are reserved for possible use by the
implementation, according to Section 4.1.2 of the May, 1988
draft of the dpANS. If they are used in application programs,
the behavior is undefined. They are, however, usable by
programmers.
If you're writing NON-PORTABLE library functions to support
applications in a specific hardware/software environment, you
can use this namespace (after checking for actual conflicts on
your particular system) without polluting the namespace that is
available for portable programs.
Chuck Karish karish at denali.stanford.edu
hplabs!hpda!mindcrf!karish
(415) 493-7277
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