Character and string literals

[Norman Diamond]

comp.lang.c has been added to the distribution of this followup.

Mr. Sommarskog tested the Eiffel compiler to see which characters are
accepted in character and/or string literals.  The Eiffel compiler
generates a portable assembly code (C of course) as intermediate code.

In article <102 at enea.se> sommar at enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:

>  Now, what about the error the C compiler detected? The cause is
>the very last string, which contains character 255. (Which corre-
>sponds to lowercase dotted "y" in 8859/1.) Apparently the C compiler
>takes this end of file. (My knowledge of C and Unix is little, but
>isn't -1 often a code for end of file? And -1 and 255 is the same
>thing for a byte.)

Indeed yes.  There are periodic flamefests in comp.lang.c, reminding
C programmers that they should getchar() into a short or int, instead
of into a char, so that they can test the int value correctly against
the constant EOF, which is -1.  Looks like some programmer wrote a
C compiler without knowing how to use C.  (This happens a lot.)

--
Norman Diamond, Sony Computer Science Lab (diamond%csl.sony.jp at relay.cs.net)
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