What is the origin / meaning of these variable naming conventions?

Posted by Andrew Hubbs on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Andrew Hubbs
Published on 2010-05-05T13:31:30Z Indexed on 2010/05/05 20:18 UTC
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What is the general meaning and where did it start to have variables with leading or trailing underscores?

ex: _varName and varName_

I have always thought a leading underscore indicated the variable was a pointer but I don't know where I got this idea. Recently I have seen these naming conventions used in Java which makes that reasoning completely wrong.

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