Kevin,
On 19/11/2010, at 6:30 AM, Marko Mäkelä <marko.makela@stripped>
wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 09:39:15AM -0600, Kevin Lewis wrote:
>> Most of the code I have worked on in the past used extra '-' before
>> macro variables and sometimes after. Older preprocessors did not
>> enforce the scope of those variables. They used to let all
>> variables take on the scope of the code they happen to be dropped
>> into.
>
> I am not aware of such preprocessors, and I have used various C
> development environments since 1991 or so.
>
> Could you be thinking of variables that are introduced in the macro
> expansion? There are a few such variables in the InnoDB code base,
> in some data structure iterators. Heikki has used the 313 suffix for
> them, and the <valgrind/memcheck.h> uses the _qzz prefix, probably
> because it must try harder to avoid clashes.
>
> Some 10 years ago, I wrote a translator that generated C code. I
> used the i prefix for some generated functions, which turned out to
> be a bad idea: i386 was a reserved symbol in the default GCC
> configuration.
>
> Marko
I'm not sure which variables you are referring to. To establish
context, the preprocessor is simply a text processor like m4. The
scope of any C variable however is determinded by the rules of the C
language. _ prefixed variables are reserved for library writers IIRC
and should be avoided.
I don't have my C99 standard at hand to quote chapter and verse.
Regards,
-sunny
