Re: Portability of preprocessor directives

[Paul D. Smith]

%% Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

  pe> That is, I assume he's mildly interested in pre-ANSI compilers
  pe> that shipped some time in the last decade or so; that he's not at
  pe> all interested in the original Unix Version 7 C compiler, which is
  pe> long dead; and that his interest level in other nonstandard
  pe> compilers primarily depends on how likely someone will actually
  pe> want to use those compilers to build the next version of GNU
  pe> "make".

I'm interested even in compilers that might have shipped prior to the
last decade, if they're used, but I'm not interested in compilers that
no one uses anymore for any practical work.

  pe> In that light I don't think my comments were misleading. However,
  pe> if you know of any C compilers that are plausible targets for the
  pe> next version of GNU make, and which don't support #elif and/or
  pe> require "#" to be in column 1, I'd like to hear about them.

I'm happy to put "#" in column 1: that's my normal coding style anyway.

However, being allowed to use elif would be a HUGE benefit to
simplifying the GNU make code, which is riddled with preprocessor
statements to allow it to work on all the different architectures it
does (yes, it would be good if the interfaces were abstracted so that
this level if ifdef'ing wasn't necessary... in an ideal world...).

Without elif the logic gets _considerably_ more messy and difficult to
maintain.

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