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From: bright@dataio.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang.c
Subject: Re: microsoft C considered stupid
Message-ID: <1030@dataio.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 23-Jun-86 13:33:07 EDT
Article-I.D.: dataio.1030
Posted: Mon Jun 23 13:33:07 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Jun-86 07:07:45 EDT
References: <1986Jun20.01:10:46.477@utcs.uucp>
Reply-To: bright@dataio.UUCP (Walter Bright
Organization: Data I/O Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 24

In article <1986Jun20.01:10:46.477@utcs.uucp> flaps@utcs.uucp (Alan J Rosenthal) writes:
>I have just received MS C for the IBM PC/AT running MS-DOS.
>The manuals, besides being poorly and sometimes inaccurately written,
>encourage all sorts of stupid things.
>1. They have instituted a pre-processor conditional of the form
>	#if defined(MANIFEST_CONSTANT).  Furthermore, the manual notes that
>	use of #ifdef is "discouraged" (though at least they support it).
>	Here in net.lang.c several C revision proposals have been rejected on
>	the grounds that they don't add enough to the language to merit the
>	inconvenience of a change.  This change from #ifdef adds absolutely
>	nothing to the language!

Ah, but it does add an important capability! It is very convenient to do:

#if defined(abc) && defined(def) || defined(ghi)
	code...
#endif

I need this capability as I write code that is ported to as many as 8
different C compilers and machines.

Of course, the feature already exists, because if an identifier is not
defined it is replaced with 0 in #if expressions, but I think that's
a worse kludge.