Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!kddlab!titcca!sragwa!wsgw!socslgw!diamond!diamond From: diamond@diamond.csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond) Newsgroups: comp.std.c Subject: Re: Reserved names in ANSI C Message-ID: <10414@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET> Date: 22 Jun 89 02:22:55 GMT References: <13680@haddock.ima.isc.com> <1598@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <1989Jun21.090428.9636@twwells.com> Sender: news@csl.sony.JUNET Reply-To: diamond@csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond) Organization: Sony Computer Science Laboratory Inc., Tokyo, Japan Lines: 22 In article <1989Jun21.090428.9636@twwells.com> bill@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@relay.cs.net) The above opinions are claimed by your machine's init process (pid 1), after being disowned and orphaned. However, if you see this at Waterloo, Stanford, or Anterior, then their administrators must have approved of these opinions.