Criticism of the C programming language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:11, 11 December 2007

Revision as of 16:12, 11 December 2007

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int sixteen = 0x3e-0x2e;

Because ANSI C provides support for [[Scientific_notation#E_notation|scientific notation]] support, <code>e-</code> or <code>e+</code> is allowed as part of a number by the preprocessor. Since token-matching is greedy, <code>0x3e-0x2e</code> is converted to a single preprocessing token. However, because of the mix of [[floating-point]] and [[hexadecimal]] notation, the subsequent conversion of that to a token in a later phase of translation is ill-defined. In this particular case, spaces around the minus sign must be added so the compiler can obtain the intended tokenization:

int sixteen = 0x3e - 0x2e;