Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: 509?? (Re: Max line length)
Message-ID: <775@twwells.uucp>
Date: 14 Mar 89 04:28:15 GMT
References: <2102@jasper.UUCP> <207600017@s.cs.uiuc.edu> <9777@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <11005@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <648@jhereg.Jhereg.MN.ORG> <2285@buengc.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
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In article <2285@buengc.BU.EDU> bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton) writes:
: John Carr and Doug Gwyn both quoted the pANS as requiring compilers to
: accept at least 509 chars of logical line...
:
: Huh???

I don't know the real reason. But here is a suggestion:

512 (a nice round number :-) - 1 CR - 1 LF - 1 NUL = 509.

In other words, the compiler might have a 512 character buffer and
reserve 3 bytes for the end of line stuff, leaving 509 characters for
the real text.

It's just a guess.

---
Bill
{ uunet | novavax } !twwells!bill
(BTW, I'm going to be looking for a new job sometime in the next
few months.  If you know of a good one, do send me e-mail.)