🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep14.225546.4277@xilinx.com> lou@xilinx.com (Lou Sanchez-Chopitea) writes:
>Hi,
>    What is the scope of the arguments in a prototype? In particular do I have
>to worry about "a" and "b" in:
>    double func ( double a, int b);
>if it is a header file, conflicting with variables a user might wish to define?

Identifiers declared as formal arguments in a prototype declaration have very
short scope, so in that sense you're safe.  (This fact does cause problems if
you try to declare something like
	extern char *asctime(struct tm const *);
since the short scope prevents this from serving as the first declaration of
the struct tag; for this reason it's necessary to put the struct declaration
before the prototype, or at least predeclare the tag with
	struct tm;
to establish a scope.)

However, there's a different danger: the header may exhibit incorrect behavior
if the user, before including the header, has defined a *macro* with the name
|a| or |b|.  For this reason, it's better to leave out the identifiers in
declaration prototypes, or use names that are within your documented
namespace.  ("__a" works if this is part of the standard library.)

Karl W. Z. Heuer (karl@ima.isc.com or uunet!ima!karl), The Walking Lint