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From: dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran,comp.unix.cray
Subject: Re: why has Cray dropped CPP support from cf77?
Message-ID: <2992@charon.cwi.nl>
Date: 20 Feb 91 23:05:52 GMT
References: <1991Feb19.162007.28774@ncsa.uiuc.edu> <1991Feb19.203555.8262@craycos.com> <1991Feb19.230305.22563@convex.com>
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In article <1991Feb19.230305.22563@convex.com> tchrist@convex.COM (Tom Christiansen) writes:
 > 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.

The didn't care.  At least, I have read so many comments to this effect that
it must be true.  The reasoning was (these are my words, and I represent
nobody):
1.	The C preprocessor is just what it says it is: a C preprocessor.
2.	There are enough implementations of C compilers that do not give
	a freestanding preprocessor.
3.	There is a number of, slightly incompatible, implementations of the
	preprocessor.
Clearly 3 dictated that the preprocessor ought to be standardized (and there
were lot's of people that were yelling that the committee's design broke
existing applications; the same would have been true had they made other
choices).  In order to standardize it was necessary to tie more closely to
the C language; hence they didn't care.

Of course, all users that used cpp to process Fortran, Pascal, perl, and
what you have are in the dark.  (Is the utility calendar(1) now also broken?)
On the other hand, if you did use cpp to do only conditional compilation,
simple substitution and file inclusion, it would not be too difficult to
write a replacement.  One of these days I might even do that.
--
dik t. winter, cwi, amsterdam, nederland
dik@cwi.nl