why has Cray dropped CPP support from cf77?

[Tom Christiansen]

>From the keyboard of pmk at craycos.com (Peter Klausler):
:It would appear infeasible to use an ANSI Standard C preprocessor or
:preprocessing phase as a general cpp-like macro processor for Fortran or CAL.
:Why? ANS C preprocessing is token-based, not character-based, and applies ANS C
:tokenization to its input. This works fine for C, of course, but has some
:trouble with Hollerith data, CAL's odd O' and X' syntax, apostrophes in Fortran
:comments, etc.
:
:Beats me how we'll ever get rid of /lib/cpp, or if we should even want to do so.

The ANSI cpp broke a lot of existing applications.  Wearing my sysadmin
and toolsmith hat, I get the feeling that the committee either didn't
recognize or else didn't care that cpp was a *general tool* used by many
utilities and script to do macro processing, and that by tying it in this
much closer to C, they break these existing applications.  I can no longer
use cpp in its ANSI form for a lot of things I used to be able to use it
for, like xrdb, perl, and various other Makefiles and sysadmin scripts.
Thank God ANSI hasn't gotten to m4 yet.

--tom
--
Tom Christiansen		tchrist at convex.com	convex!tchrist
 "All things are possible, but not all expedient."  (in life, UNIX, and perl)