Thread: Leading Underscores

which makes it perfectly clear that an underscore followed by an upper case letter is reserved in each and every situation, regardless of scope

err... the C++ standard makes that pretty clear too.
"... or begins with an underscore followed by an uppercase letter (2.11) is reserved to the implementation for any use."

the debate is completely about interpretation and theory because all of us avoid leading underscores in our code

Yeah, but I had to ask because I dont want to go around claiming the wrong thing.

It's too bad we can't grab the person who wrote that rule and ask what was really meant just for peace of mind.

Well, if we can find out from the committee(s) involved...

>err... the C++ standard makes that pretty clear too.
>"... or begins with an underscore followed by an uppercase letter (2.11) is reserved to the implementation for any use."
*sigh*

Originally Posted by sean_mackrory

The important thing is not what they meant. You can write code based on "what they meant" all you like. If it's not compatible with most compilers, you're not going to get very far.

Don't you think this is an irrelevant point since the conversation is strictly theoretical? We've already established that the guideline for good practice is to always avoid leading underscores, and we all follow that guideline. You seem to have misunderstood and thought that I actually push the limits of the standard.

I'm sorry to say that I'm rather boring, I work in a comfortably safe subset of the language at any given time.

hmm... this is like nearly a year ago, and now it seems that there's an article on Programming Style, Naming Conventions that touches on this by stating:

Finally, a common convention is to prefix the private fields and methods of a class with an underscore: e.g., _private_data.

Perhaps it might be a good idea for the article to warn about the pitfalls of using an underscore prefix, or maybe just suggest using the other convention of an underscore suffix?