C in 6th Edition Unix was a wild and woolly language

Presumably this is why members of common unixy structs have their names prefixed a bit (e.g. st_mode)

I was just thinking that before I screamed, and hid under the desk.

The prefixes are due to K&R era single namespace for all struct members ... this is a pre-K&R C where there was even less struct type checking

And it's still a good idea today because the preprocessor has a single namespace.