Of Standards and Inventions: A Cautionary Tale

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1525 at dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright at dataio.UUCP (Walter Bright) writes:
>I don't understand why ANSI C doesn't allow casts and sizeofs in
>preprocessor expressions. ...
>In my compiler, they follow the same rules because it's the same code!

We didn't want to mandate that the preprocessor be integrated into the
language parser proper.  I agree that the language would be nicer if
it WERE so integrated, but for historical reasons it wasn't.