Macro names imbedded in pp-numbers [repost]
Doug Gwyn
gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL
Sun Nov 19 12:10:52 AEST 1989
In article <1653 at crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen at crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
>I don't think this will bring a huge number of programs crashing down,
It won't. Several committee members "grepped" for such usage in existing
code to see if it would be a significant factor. For example, the whole
source code for UNIX was scanned. We determined that it would not be a
significant problem for existing source code.
>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.
That's a significant reason for this particular feature of the
specification. However, you seem to be implying that selfish
considerations by vendors are acting to the detriment of users.
There were a significant number of user-oriented X3J11 committee
members (including myself), and of course most vendor representatives
also function as C users themselves. We bought into the notion of
simplicitiy in this case as being of value to programmers as well as
implementors. Only ignorant programmers might have a problem, but
that is true of very many aspects of C; C is not a language for those
who refuse to learn before doing. We expect that this particular
quirk will be taught in C textbooks much as the need for () around
parameters in macro definitions already is taught.
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