Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Want the word on __STDC__
Message-ID: <1991Feb22.040047.27888@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <4755@lib.tmc.edu> <1991Feb20.175702.28682@zoo.toronto.edu> <2961@cirrusl.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 1991 04:00:47 GMT

In article <2961@cirrusl.UUCP> dhesi%cirrusl@oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>     ...since many C compilers do not *have* a separate preprocessor.
>
>I may have to eat my words, but after extensive searching, I haven't
>yet found any commercially available C compiler that wasn't accompanied
>by a separately invokable preprocessor.

Note that the two statements are not entirely inconsistent:  it is quite
possible to invoke only the preprocessor functionality of a compiler that
does not break it out as a separate program.  I assure you that there are
quite a few compilers that integrate the preprocessor into the scanner;
the Whitesmiths compiler was the first.  In fact, when implementing from
scratch, it makes little sense to separate preprocessor and scanner,
since it means tokenizing the source twice.

I suspect that most any sensible implementor would provide a way to invoke
the preprocessor functionality only.  However, there is no requirement to
do so, and no guarantee that an ANSI implementation will do so... which was
the point of my original posting.
-- 
"Read the OSI protocol specifications?  | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
I can't even *lift* them!"              |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry