suggestion for make.names

I'm providing a new implementation (and documentation) of make.names 

I would like to suggest a modification to the make.names() function.
The current implementation has two problems: 
1. It doesn't check if a name matches an R keyword (like "function").
2. The uniqueness algorithm is not invariant to concatenation.
   In other words, 
   make.names(c("a","a","a"),unique=T) != 
   make.names(c(make.names(c("a","a"),unique=T),"a"),unique=T)

The first problem means that you can construct a data frame for which 
there is no valid formula:
  lm(if~then, data.frame("if"=3,"then"=4))

The second problem means that you get funny row names when you build
up a data frame by concatenation:
  rbind(data.frame(x=1),data.frame(x=2),data.frame(x=3)) !=
  rbind(rbind(data.frame(x=1),data.frame(x=2)),data.frame(x=3))

I'm providing a new implementation (and documentation) of make.names which
fixes these problems.  The uniqueness part is handled by make.unique, a
useful function in its own right.  For example, the following code in
rbind.data.frame:
    while(any(xj <- duplicated(rlabs)))
    rlabs[xj] <- paste(rlabs[xj], 1:sum(xj), sep = "")
could be replaced by:
    rlabs = make.unique(rlabs)

Another way to fix the first problem, by the way, would be to allow
quoting in formulas, e.g. lm("if" ~ then, ...).  Currently, when you
do this it gives an error.  This could eliminate the need for
make.names in many cases, by being able to quote names like 
"New Jersey" or "log(x)".