From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <46a49abf9f3cb8bedf2a83b89dff8fcc@caldo.demon.co.uk> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] plan9's C compiler and // comments From: Charles Forsyth In-Reply-To: <016f01c37b27$e920fca0$b9844051@insultant.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 08:21:48 +0100 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 36422b00-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 >>things were not helped by the complexity of the reiser cpp either. the remarkable thing is that later work on C ADDED to the preprocessor, and even more later! ``when you're in a hole ...'' fortunately, it must be said that even in some of the worst code i've seen the authors kept to the simpler constructions. the main problems in practice tend to be the use of it at all (eg, Linux enumerating arbitrarily many platforms in a single file controlled by #ifdef!), and overly complex #if expressions (which, not being checked much can easily go wrong). a little gem recently was ``#if ndef ...''.