Line length (was Re: "Broken" compilers)

Larry Jones scjones at sdrc.UUCP
Tue May 8 07:49:10 AEST 1990


In article <1645 at tkou02.enet.dec.com>, diamond at tkou02.enet.dec.com (diamond at tkovoa) writes:
> In article <1374 at sdrc.UUCP> scjones at sdrc.UUCP (Larry Jones) writes:
> >Since the preprocessor grammar is token based, the result of
> >preprocessing is a stream of tokens, not logical lines, so the
> >size of the result is not subject to the logical line length
> >limit!
> 
> In Phase 3, "... decomposed into preprocessing tokens ... New-line
> characters are retained."  So logical lines exist even after
> tokenizing.  When do new-line characters go away?  In Pase 7,
> "White-space characters separating tokens are no longer significant."

I'm not convinced that logical lines still exist just because the
new-line characters are preserved as new-line tokens.  I guess
the question is whether logical source line is a well-defined
term which refers explicitly to the result of Phase 2, or an
ill-defined term which just refers to the general concept of
lines.

> It seems that Tom Plum's letter to me agreed with the rules of the
> standard, and the limit applies after macro expansion (as well as
> before).  These rules were not overridden by an example (half-sarcasm
> here), and no one has quoted an official interpretation.

Sounds to me like there should probably be an official request for
interpretation on this issue.
----
Larry Jones                         UUCP: uunet!sdrc!scjones
SDRC                                      scjones at SDRC.UU.NET
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