[TUHS] why the leading under score added to function names?

[Dave Horsfall]

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