Line length (was Re: "Broken" compilers)

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1645 at tkou02.enet.dec.com> diamond at tkou02.enet.dec.com (diamond at tkovoa) writes:
>In Phase 3, "... decomposed into preprocessing tokens ... New-line
>characters are retained."  So logical lines exist even after
>tokenizing.

But there is no meaningful measure of line length (# of characters in
a source line) at that point, because one has tokens, not characters
in the original sense.

>These rules were not overridden by an example (half-sarcasm
>here), and no one has quoted an official interpretation.

Nobody had properly requested an official interpretation of this,
as of the last X3J11 meeting in March 1990.  If you care about this,
you should send in your request to CBEMA X3.