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From: gwyn@brl-vgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: a+++b parsing according to manual
Message-ID: <1230@brl-vgr.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 2-May-84 04:54:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-vgr.1230
Posted: Wed May  2 04:54:29 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 3-May-84 19:50:48 EDT
References: <2388@ecsvax.UUCP>
Organization: Ballistics Research Lab
Lines: 14

Certainly
	a+ ++b
cannot be parsed as
	a++ + b
since "+ +" is not a valid way of writing the ++ operator.
Spaces are indeed sometimes significant, which is why they SHOULD BE USED
when writing hard-to-parse-by-eye-and-maybe-by-compiler expressions.

Here is another good one for you; Ron Natalie reminded me today of the
fellow who used the C preprocessor to form composite tokens by something like
	#define	cat( a, b )	a/**/b
Of course this is SUPPOSED to work, but it depends on careful handling of
comments by the C preprocessor lexical analyzer.  (Consider what would
happen if a preliminary "comment stripping" pass were applied blindly.)