karl@haddock.UUCP (Karl Heuer) (01/12/87)
ANSI C has a requirement that the translator must accept a 509-character line. Somebody wrote that this limit was more than enough and (jokingly?) suggested that it should be reduced to 132 for the benefit of his/her printer. I then stated that, since the constraint was applied after macro expansion, even 509 characters could be tight (cf. "putchar(getchar())"). I was wrong; Jerry Schwarz (ulysses!jss) has pointed out via e-mail that the wording "logical source line" is the result of eliminating backslash-newline, so the limit applies to a macro definition, but not its expansion. Sorry for any confusion I may have caused. Karl W. Z. Heuer (ima!haddock!karl or karl@haddock.isc.com), The Walking Lint (Did I say that *all* such limits should be *designed* to be more than enough? My own rule of thumb for allocating static arrays is to guess a "reasonable" size, round up to the next power of two, and multiply by 4.)