509?? (Re: Max line length)

[T. William Wells]

In article <2285 at buengc.BU.EDU> bph at 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
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