ANSI proposal for preprocessor strings

[Donn Seeley]

Henry, I fear your argument by analogy is weak.  Did it ever occur to
you that implementations of Berkeley Unix exist on many computers other
than the VAX?  (Sun, NBI, NSC, Tektronix, Pyramid, Convex, ...) The
Reiser preprocessor undoubtedly followed most if not all of these ports
with little alteration; the inline assembler code did not.  (If inline
assembler is protected by preprocessor conditional compilation
directives, as it really should be, porting is no problem either,
although the generic code will often run slower than customized
assembler code.  Register assignment conventions such as the ones Henry
discusses have not perceptibly impeded the porting of Berkeley Unix,
although I agree they are probably unnecessary.) The C preprocessor
supplied with System V is also Reiser-based and appears to contain the
same extensions (our sole System V machine is dead with disk problems
but a quick study of the sources supports my conclusion).  The Reiser
preprocessor is part of a portable software environment that is used in
many places; in fact it would not surprise me to hear that the vast
majority of C programmers use the Reiser preprocessor, although I have
no statistics on this.

The Reiser preprocessor's string substitution behavior is clearly one
of the most popular C extensions, and for that reason alone deserves
careful consideration.  I find it more than a little odd that it is
given such short shrift by some participants in this discussion when
rather more radical proposals such as case ranges are being casually
bandied about.

My own feeling is that the ANSI C standard is not the place to make C
perfect; C (including its common extensions) has enough imperfections
that it seems pointless to break existing code just to fix a tiny
fraction of them.  I suggest that people concentrate their corrective
impulses on a new language, such as C++.

Try to guess how I feel about Fortran 77,

Donn Seeley    University of Utah CS Dept    donn at utah-cs.arpa
40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W    (801) 581-5668    decvax!utah-cs!donn