[BusyBox] Grinding through the patch list for 1.0.1...

[Rob Landley]

On Thursday 14 July 2005 01:29, Larry Doolittle wrote:
> Rob -
>
> > Putting whitespace between # and define is NOT an improvement over
> > indenting the #define.  Really, it isn't.  Honest and truly.
>
> There used to be some "C" compilers that accepted whitespace
> after the # but not before.  I just double checked the C90
> standard (actually the n869 draft), and those compilers are
> not up to snuff.  If they don't get that right, they shouldn't
> be trusted with the rest of busybox, either.
>
>       - Larry

People are sometimes surprised that it's legal to put a space between the # 
and the preprocessor directive, since you almost never see it.  (Yes, it is 
legal.  I found this out writing a program called "bake" for OS/2 a decade 
ago, which was an intelligent make that turned a simple list of source files 
into an executable and worked out dependencies and such by recursively 
parsing #includes.  I don't think I found out because I actually encountered 
code that did put a space there back under OS/2, but because somebody pointed 
out the relevant portion of the spec... :)

It's also useful to be able to grep for "#define", and beyond that it's just 
_ugly_ to put a space in there...

Rob