Path: utzoo!yunexus!ists!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!samsung!aplcen!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Macro names imbedded in pp-numbers [repost]
Message-ID: <11647@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 19 Nov 89 01:21:20 GMT
Article-I.D.: smoke.11647
References: <11134@riks.csl.sony.co.jp> <31615@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 22

In article <31615@watmath.waterloo.edu> datanguay@watmath.waterloo.edu (David Adrien Tanguay) writes:
>However, there might be a statement elsewhere that says that a
>pre-processor token can be converted into a sequence of tokens.

No; the conversion in translation phase 7 is one-to-one.

>This problem was brought to the committee's attention, but it took them
>a while to understand the problem (they thought everybody was complaining
>about the concept of a pre-processor number, rather than the specific
>definition). By the time they did figure it out, they had already declared
>that the botched definition would stand. (Hopefully a committee member will
>inject some reality into the previous sentence.) Oh well, you should be
>using white space anyway.

This is misleading, because whenever really solid arguments were made,
X3J11 was always willing to fix a demonstrated error in the draft
specification; there were numerous occasions when this did occur.

As I recall the committee sentiment, it wasn't felt that this slightly
over-generous glomming onto source characters for pp-numbers posed a
serious practical problem, and it did drastically simplify that part
of the preprocessor.  The trade-off seemed worthwhile.