🚀 go-pugleaf

berthold@ix.netcom.com (Richard Berthold) wrote:
>I have written a program which outputs C code and recently ran into a
>problem under OpenVMS related to the length of lines of code. It is not
>difficult to split the output into multiple lines with a \ at the end
>of the multiple lines but I have some questions about how sophisticated
>an algorithm must be used.

Geez, this sounds familiar. I wrote a paper about this that was published
in the June, 1991 issue of _The Journal of C Language Translation_. Contact
John Levine at jclt@iecc.com for information about back issues. Now that
I think about it, though, the previous owner, Rex Jeaschke, may own the
copyright. I may be able to find the code I wrote that'll do all the
splitting for you automatically between tokens.

>Any help with the following types of questions would be appreciated.
>
>Is there a limit to the number of characters in a physical line of C
>code which a "standard" compiler must be able to read (ie all lines
>must be less than 80 characters etc)?

There is the 509-character logical-source-line translation limit. Because
physical lines are spliced into logical lines, your physical lines cannot be
larger than that and still be strictly conforming.

>If there is no standard limit, does anyone know of any current
>compilers with small limits ie < 512 ?

No, but I haven't tried. :-)

>Must all compilers support \ as a line continuation character?

All conforming C compilers must, yes. Borland once acknowledged a bug
to me regarding line continuation. Don't know if they fixed it. (BTW,
I doubt whether there are _any_ conforming implementations. Seems like
everybody has some little wart that precludes it.)

-- 
Paul Long                               45:29:14N 122:48:09W
plong@perf.com                          http://www.teleport.com/~pciwww/
    "Where time or intelligence are lacking, a goto may do the job."
        - M.E. Hopkins, "A Case for the GOTO," 1972.