Prepending _ in C external names necessary?

[Andy Hatcher]

I've finally decided to put my two cents in.
It is not necessary for C variables to be prepended with _,

In fact, the C compiler used on our 68020 box does not prepend _,
and it works fine.  I am not a compiler wiz, but I do know that
the assembler requires register names to be prepended with %
and immediate data with &.

This has caused a very few (very minor) problems,
and we are pretty happy with the compiler.

The compiler is a system V coff format compiler.
Is this treatment of _ generic to system V?
Getting one extra character of significance in identifiers
was not the reason it was done, (the compiler already
supports long names).

	Ramblingly,
		Andy Hatcher
		Altos Computer Systems