Macro names imbedded in pp-numbers [repost]

[Wm E Davidsen Jr]

In article <1989Nov17.205004.19236 at cs.rochester.edu> quiroz at cs.rochester.edu (Cesar Quiroz) writes:

| Aside:  Over-parenthesizing your defines for paranoid reasons would
| have saved this program.  Of course, the criticized behavior remains
| buggy in the general case.

  That's what I had to go thru and do, but if that doesn't constitute
"egregiously breaking existing programs" I don't know what does. If I
ever get the time I'll grep thru the net sources and see how many have
defined hex constants ending in e. Note that of the programs which did,
only one actually failed, the rest were time-bombs, waiting until
someone used them in an expression.

  I don't think this will bring a huge number of programs crashing
down, but it does look like a case of a committee whose majority is
vendors (or was during the two years I was there) choosing a behavior
which has no benefit other than to simplify the writing of the parser.
If Global sends me the rationale with this order I'll look to see if
the thought process is described.

-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen at crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
that the world is flat!" - anon