From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: dave@horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall)
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:21:41 +1100 (EST)
Subject: [TUHS] why the leading under score added to function names?
In-Reply-To: <201202202052.q1KKqagi002055@freefriends.org>
References: <201202202052.q1KKqagi002055@freefriends.org>
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1202211012090.62608@aneurin.horsfall.org>

On Mon, 20 Feb 2012, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:

[...]

> 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?

Sure was the PDP-11 :-)  I vaguely recall that it was to make sure that
user functions did not conflict with predefined assembler functions, as
that would be a pain to diagnose (much like having swap overlap root).

-- Dave