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by kilna 477 days ago
Underscore prefix in a label has conferred a meaning of private or reserved in the C programming language since at least Unix Version 6 in 1975, which had underscores to denote system level functions and variables. MUMPS in 1966 reserved a % prefix to indicate system variables and routines, so a convention of using a non-alphanumeric character to distinguish scope has been around about as long as ASCII has been the dominant standard for text.