🚀 go-pugleaf

hermann@uran.informatik.uni-bonn.de (Hermann Stamm) writes:

>Is there any fixed upper limit for line-length in the 
>ANSI-C-standard ?

Not as such.  A Standard C compiler must handle logical source lines
(after dealing with escaped newlines) of up to 509 characters, and
string literals of up to 509 characters after concatenation.  This
means that you should apply similar limits to source code to
ensure portability.  (A compiler might have no limits on line length,
but it is allowed to have these limits.)


>The more important question I think, is, what is the reason for 
>standard C-beautifiers to break -> in the middle for long lines
>(resulting in a compiler-error).

I would expect that a "standard" C-beautifier would recognize C
tokens, and not split tokens across lines.  I would discard any
"beautifier" that behaves as you describe, since it almost certainly
will create other problems which are not so easy to find.
-- 

Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve@taumet.com
Vice Chair, ANSI C++ Committee, X3J16