Anyone know the meaning of yy?
I think it has something to do with yacc, which has files ending in .y
, and requires a function called yylex
.
As others have pointed out here and on StackOverflow, it may simply be a doubling of the y
from the name of the yacc
utility, used for generating a unique name space.
The POSIX standard reserves the namespaces starting with both yy
and YY
for yacc
with the following paragraph:
Names are of arbitrary length, made up of letters, periods (
.
), underscores (_
), and non-initial digits. Uppercase and lowercase letters are distinct. Conforming applications shall not use names beginning inyy
orYY
since theyacc
parser uses such names. Many of the names appear in the final output ofyacc
, and thus they should be chosen to conform with any additional rules created by the C compiler to be used. In particular they appear in#define
statements.
Unfortunately, the POSIX docs are very bad at relating any form of history as to why things came to be the way that they currently are.