Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!umich!samsung!think!snorkelwacker!spdcc!merk!alliant!linus!mbunix!duncant
From: duncant@mbunix.mitre.org (Thomson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: __chip is evil
Message-ID: <86113@linus.UUCP>
Date: 9 Jan 90 05:47:57 GMT
References: <85006@linus.UUCP> <4839@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Reply-To: duncant@mbunix.mitre.org (Thomson)
Organization: The MITRE Corp. Bedford, MA
Lines: 31

In article <4839@sugar.hackercorp.com>
 peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>
>Names beginning with two underscores or one underscore and an uppercase
>letter are reserved to the implementation and may be used for any purpose
>the implementer desires. Names beginning with one underscore and anything
>but an uppercase letter may be used with file scope, but as externals are
>reserved to the implementation.
>

Section 4.1.2 of (my draft of) the ANSI standard states that "All external 
identifiers that begin with an underscore and iether an upper-case letter
or another underscore are reserved."  However, this simply means that these
identifiers may be defined in standard header files, so the user should not use 
these names.  The standard does NOT say that the implementor may use these 
identifiers to change the syntax of the C language, as you are doing when you
introduce things like "__chip".  


>as well as more mundane things like hiding library routines (_write) and stuff

>On the other hand #pragma is not allowed to change the semantics of a program.

I'm sorry, but I can't find this in the standard.  Can you direct me to 
the appropriate paragraph?  Or perhaps this is something from the "Rationale"?

Again, I think that you guys are missing the point.  It seems to me that the
ANSI committee provided #pragma  exactly for handling non-standard things,
such as "__chip", which can't otherwise be done in the language.

Duncan Thomson