jeffg@tekcbi.UUCP (Jeff Glover) (09/04/85)
Why is an underscore commonly prepended to symbols generated by most C compilers? Is it archaic, or is there a good reason? I know library writers sometimes manually prepend an underscore to hide functions from casual users, but that is not what I am referring to. I was asked this question, and was unable to find a satisfactory answer. Please mail your replies, and I'll summarize for the net. -- Jeff C. Glover, Tektronix, Inc. PO Box 500, MS Y6-546, Beaverton, OR 97077 { decvax, allegra, hplabs, ihnp4 } tektronix!tekcbi!jeffg (503) 627-8438
chris@umcp-cs.UUCP (Chris Torek) (09/06/85)
>Why is an underscore commonly prepended to symbols generated by most C >compilers? The answer is so that variables like "r3" don't conflict with registers like "r3", and so forth. However, while it is no longer important now that we have flexnames, I would like to take this opportunity to wonder why the _ was not *ap*pended to external symbols, giving one eight significant characters between .o files instead of seven. -- In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 4251) UUCP: seismo!umcp-cs!chris CSNet: chris@umcp-cs ARPA: chris@maryland