ANSI proposal for preprocessor strings

VLD/VMB gwyn at Brl-Vld.ARPA
Thu Feb 28 23:11:44 AEST 1985


People who are using undocumented behavior of the specific (Reiser)
implementation of the C preprocessor are the only ones who will have
a problem with a fully tokenized CPP.  Their code is ALREADY broken,
even though it appears to work on some systems.  It should not be the
purpose of the C standards committee to legitimatize existing illegal
or nonportable use of C, but rather to define what usage IS portable.

There are C preprocessors already in wide use (I once used one) that
are built into the lexical analysis phase of the compiler.  There is
no good way to support this without defining CPP behavior in terms of
tokens.  The ugly kludges people have been using to date do not fit
this model, and what we need is a SOLUTION.  Asking everybody to code
like people at Berkeley did is not a good solution!



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