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From: cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel
Subject: Re: Character and string literals
Message-ID: <24CDEFD8.4754@marob.masa.com>
Date: 26 Jul 89 17:07:36 GMT
References: <102@enea.se> <10527@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET>
Reply-To: cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan)
Organization: ESCC,  New York City
Lines: 49

In article <10527@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET> diamond@csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond) writes:
>Mr. Sommarskog tested the Eiffel compiler to see which characters are
>accepted in character and/or string literals.  The Eiffel compiler
>generates a portable assembly code (C of course) as intermediate code.
>
>In article <102@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>
>>  Now, what about the error the C compiler detected? The cause is
>>the very last string, which contains character 255. (Which corre-
>>sponds to lowercase dotted "y" in 8859/1.) Apparently the C compiler
>>takes this end of file. (My knowledge of C and Unix is little, but
>>isn't -1 often a code for end of file? And -1 and 255 is the same
>>thing for a byte.)
>
>Indeed yes.  There are periodic flamefests in comp.lang.c, reminding
>C programmers that they should getchar() into a short or int, instead
>of into a char, so that they can test the int value correctly against
>the constant EOF, which is -1.  Looks like some programmer wrote a
>C compiler without knowing how to use C.  (This happens a lot.)


On the other hand, it would be better for the Eiffel compiler to emit
the sequence "\377" in this case, rather than the character itself.
No C program should contain characters from outside the C character set.
It's not illegal, merely a poor idea.

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