Line length (was: draft ANSI standard: needs your tomatoes)

[Karl Heuer]

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 at 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.)