Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!decvax!ima!haddock!karl From: karl@haddock.UUCP (Karl Heuer) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Line length (was: draft ANSI standard: needs your tomatoes) Message-ID: <302@haddock.UUCP> Date: Sun, 11-Jan-87 23:09:49 EST Article-I.D.: haddock.302 Posted: Sun Jan 11 23:09:49 1987 Date-Received: Mon, 12-Jan-87 03:47:27 EST Reply-To: karl@haddock.isc.com.UUCP (Karl Heuer) Distribution: world Organization: Interactive Systems, Boston Lines: 15 ANSI C has a requirement that the translator must accept a 509-character line. Somebody wrote that this limit was more than enough and (jokingly?) suggested that it should be reduced to 132 for the benefit of his/her printer. I then stated that, since the constraint was applied after macro expansion, even 509 characters could be tight (cf. "putchar(getchar())"). I was wrong; Jerry Schwarz (ulysses!jss) has pointed out via e-mail that the wording "logical source line" is the result of eliminating backslash-newline, so the limit applies to a macro definition, but not its expansion. Sorry for any confusion I may have caused. Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint (Did I say that *all* such limits should be *designed* to be more than enough? My own rule of thumb for allocating static arrays is to guess a "reasonable" size, round up to the next power of two, and multiply by 4.)