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From: minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Reserved names in ANSI C
Message-ID: <362@mountn.dec.com>
Date: 27 Jun 89 14:19:20 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> <919@cbnewsl.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: minow%thundr.dec@decwrl.dec.com (Martin Minow)
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 26

If the problem were only limits.h, or only stdio.h, or only ctype.h,
there would be no objection, but the library is, in reality, a monolith
of a dozen or so packages with a total of several hundred names, with a
variety of syntactic patterns.  I shouldn't be expected to memorize
all these names or their syntactic patterns.

The application environment has gotten steadily more complex in the
ten or twelve years since C left its original home.  I see nothing to
suggest that the environment will become simpler (indeed, quite the
opposite). 

I wish that, along with reserving a wide variety of lexical patterns
to Ansi,  some set of patterns were reserved to application programs.
For example, on VMS, XXX$<anything> is explicitly reserved to VMS
development (and a development group must reserve its private XXX header),
while XXX_<anything> is explicitly reserved to user development.

As a software architect, one of my primary tasks is managing complexity.
If, for example, ANSI reserves <letters> '__' <letters-or-digits> to
application programs, I could write standard-conforming programs without
worrying that version 2, 3, or whatever of the standard conflicted with
my code.

Martin Minow
minow%thundr.dec@decwrl.dec.com
The above does not represent the position of Digital Equipment Corporation.