namespace rules (Was: Re: sbitmap cleanups)

[Zack Weinberg]

On Tue, Apr 11, 2000 at 06:47:39PM -0700, John Marshall wrote:
> Richard Henderson wrote:
> > You realize, of course, that using X_ was intentional?  I really
> > hate how many programs violate namespace rules by overusing _X.
> 
> I was going to make a similar comment about this patch last month
> 
> 	http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2000-03/msg00224.html
> 
> ("Clean up cpplib's internal namespace") but I wasn't sure how
> zealous we were about these things.  There are already a number of
> these sorts of things in GCC, but it seemed a shame to introduce
> new ones.

Unless someone's changed the rules on me, names starting with an
underscore and a lowercase letter are legitimate in user programs.
Only names starting with _[A-Z] or __ are reserved for the
implementation.

zw