draft ANSI standard: Is a quote a valid preprocessor-token?

[John Gilmore]

In article <1971 at emory.UUCP>, arnold at emory.UUCP writes:
> #define CTRL(X)	(' ## X ## ' & 037)	/* ascii only */
>    ...uses the token concatenation operator to produce the character
> constant....
> I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong.

I thought he was wrong, but I looked again at the standard.  I didn't
believe that a single quote would be considered a preprocessing token;
I figured it would parse as

	#define CTRL(X)	(string & 037)
	where string is: ' ## X ## '

(Of course multiple character '...' constants are legal in the draft
proposed standard, but let's not get off the track...)  The definition
of preprocessor-token is (pg 74, sec 3.8):

	preprocessing-token:
		header-name	 (only within a #include directive)
		identifier
		constant
		string-literal
		operator
		punctuator
		each non-white-space character that cannot be one of the above

Aha!  Since a lone quote is not any of the above, it must be one of those
"each non white space characters", and it must be a preprocessing-token.
Right?

Phooey.  There should be specific instructions in the standard on
lexical analysis of C programs, e.g. an algorithm for parsing, rather
than this vague English rubbish.  This applies to section 2.1.1.2
("The source file is decomposed into preprocessing tokens...") too.
I can see my source files slowly decomposing in there now...
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu   gnu at ingres.berkeley.edu
  I forsee a day when there are two kinds of C compilers: standard ones and 
  useful ones ... just like Pascal and Fortran.  Are we making progress yet?
	-- ASC:GUTHERY%slb-test.csnet