Macro names imbedded in pp-numbers

[David Adrien Tanguay]

In article <TOM.89Nov20072452 at hcx2.ssd.harris.com> (Tom Horsley) writes:
 >>As I recall the committee sentiment, it wasn't felt that this slightly
 >>over-generous glomming onto source characters for pp-numbers posed a
 >>serious practical problem, and it did drastically simplify that part
 >>of the preprocessor.  The trade-off seemed worthwhile.
 >
 >I am sorry, I can't watch this discussion passively anymore. This is simply
 >wrong. I was one of the first to complain to the committee about this bug.
 >The reason I noticed it was that I was writing a tokenizing pre-processor as
 >the standard was under development. In my implementation, I did not find
 >*ANY* simplification that pp-numbers provided.

I had to add a little code to my cpp, too. However, Doug meant that
it simplified the standard's specification, not necessarily any
implementation of cpp.

As you mention further on in your article, it may have been possible to
come up with a clean specification, but it would have required a lot of work
to verify that the new specification didn't fall apart in some other area.
I guess the committee decided that this one minor wart wasn't worth the
trouble.

David Tanguay