The \c escape

[Tony Luck]

In article <963 at ficc.UUCP> peter at ficc.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>
>(2) What's wrong with a readable and maintainable way of initialising a
>    32-bit unsigned integer to 0x464F524DL? You prefer that (or ('F'<<24)|
>    ('O'<<16)|('R'<<8)|('M')) to 'FORM'?

But (as many people have already tried to point out) multi-character constants
aren't portable .... 'FORM' isn't necessarily 0x464F524DL e.g. on my machine
here (68030 based, i.e. big-endian) the following program:

	main() { printf("0x%x\n", 'FORM'); }

produces as output:

	0x4d524f46

Which in these days of portable data interchange, and networked systems is
likely to mess up your whole day.

Tony Luck