From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: arnold@skeeve.com (arnold@skeeve.com)
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:52:36 -0800
Subject: [TUHS] why the leading under score added to function names?
Message-ID: <201202202052.q1KKqagi002055@freefriends.org>

Hi All.

Recently at work I helped someone figure out that when working with ld,
the name of a function "foo" gets turned into "_foo" by the compiler.
(It took this old-timer 15 minutes to solve a problem he had been working
on for two days!)

I'm pretty sure this dates back to PDP-11 days.  I'm wondering "why?".
Why did the C compiler prepend an underscore to function names?

Thanks,

Arnold