Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Reserved names in ANSI C
Message-ID: <10441@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 23 Jun 89 14:42:16 GMT
References: <GEOFF.89Jun11231924@onyx.cs.warwick.ac.uk> <13680@haddock.ima.isc.com> <1598@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <875@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> <316@mountn.dec.com> <884@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> <321@mountn.dec.com>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 12

In article <321@mountn.dec.com> minow@mountn.UUCP (Martin Minow) writes:
>I continue to have difficulty writing transportable programs when well-meaning
>implementors use useful words (such as "line" in one vendor's Macintosh
>C library).  Since there is only one Ansi Standard and, hopefully, many
>people writing code to that standard, I wish the Committee had found
>way to prevent the C-implementation namespace from growing without bounds.

But the proposed Standard does address this issue.  To take your example
of <limits.h>, non-underscore stuff beyond that specified in the Standard
is not permitted to be defined by <limits.h> in a standard-conforming C
implementation.  The Standard imposes definite bounds on name space
pollution; as Dave noted, this is a unique achievement.