The \c escape

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <963 at ficc.UUCP> peter at ficc.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <8127 at brl-smoke.ARPA>, gwyn at brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
>> Multiple-character character constants are unportable and
>> considered bad style.  They're only permitted because they were in previous
>> practice.  Many of us don't think you should ever try to make use of them.

>(1) OK, how do you spell "\x234\c5"? "\x234""5"?

Sure.  What's wrong with using the more general facility for strings?

>(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'?

I would prefer that you not depend on being able to jam 'FORM' into
an int in the first place.  It will obviously not work on a 16-bit
implementation.

If you nonetheless feel you have to use a kludge a la troff, try
	#define	PACK(c1,c2)	((c1)<<8 | (c2))
which at least is portable across 8-bit byte implementations.