Macro names imbedded in pp-numbers
jss at jra.ardent.com
jss at jra.ardent.com
Tue Nov 28 14:02:23 AEST 1989
I have decided to add my 2 cents to this discussion because
I am the person who originally formulated the idea of pp-number
in a comment during the _first_ public review.
I was motivated to do so by two factors.
One (which has already been alluded to) was the need for a
precise definition of token. An associate was working on a
preprocessor and the definition in the draft (based on the
idea of longest legal prefix) were ambiguous. We attempted
to clean it up, but found ourselves getting into a quagmire
of complexity. The pp-number approach seemed much simpler.
The second (which I have not seen mentioned) was the need to
allow for extending the possible forms of numbers into the future.
E.g. 0b1001, 1LL, 4K. With the current specification all these
might be taken as numbers (binary, long long, scaled by 1024) by
a conforming compiler or in some future version of C.
Ease of implementation was not a consideration at all.
Jerry Schwarz
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