Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: how widespread is this cpp bug? Message-ID: <1988Dec1.194550.15055@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <49179@pyramid.pyramid.com> Date: Thu, 1 Dec 88 19:45:50 GMT In article <49179@pyramid.pyramid.com> markhall@pyramid.UUCP (Mark Hall) writes: > prin/* comment in the middle */tf ( "Hello World.\n" ); > >...Does your cpp have this `feature'? Anyone know the history? I >suspect that AT&T and SUN know about this, but have chosen not to fix it. >Anyone know why? This token-concatenation technique is a quirk (quirk, n: accidental and unintended behavior that is not clearly a bug and may be useful) of the Reiser cpp implementation, which is universal in AT&T-derived compilers and virtually nonexistent elsewhere. It has seen enough use to make folks who already have it reluctant to drop support for it, but it is a quirk of specific compilers and was never documented as a property of the language. X3J11 has provided the same capability in a cleaner and more portable way (the Reiser trick does not work in tokenizing preprocessors) with their ## operator. Ugh. -- SunOSish, adj: requiring | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 32-bit bug numbers. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu