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From: jss@jra.ardent.com
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Macro names imbedded in pp-numbers
Message-ID: <9394@ardent.UUCP>
Date: 28 Nov 89 03:02:23 GMT
References: <11134@riks.csl.sony.co.jp> <31615@watmath.waterloo.edu> <31792@watmath.waterloo.edu>
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Organization: Ardent Computer Corp., Sunnyvale, CA
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I have decided to add my 2 cents to this discussion because
I am the person who originally formulated the idea of pp-number 
in a comment during the _first_ public review.

I was motivated to do so by two factors.  

    One (which has already been alluded to) was the need for a 
    precise definition of token.  An associate was working on a 
    preprocessor and the definition in the draft (based on the
    idea of longest legal prefix) were ambiguous.  We attempted
    to clean it up, but found ourselves getting into a quagmire
    of complexity.  The pp-number approach seemed much simpler. 
    
    The second (which I have not seen mentioned) was the need to 
    allow for extending the possible forms of numbers into the future.
    E.g. 0b1001, 1LL, 4K.  With the current specification all these 
    might be taken as numbers (binary, long long, scaled by 1024) by 
    a conforming compiler or in some future version of C. 

Ease of implementation was not a consideration at all.  

Jerry Schwarz