Re: c/4270: quoted ctrl M breaks parser

[Zack Weinberg <zack@codesourcery.com>]

The following reply was made to PR c/4270; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Zack Weinberg <zack@codesourcery.com>
To: george@palisad.com
Cc: gcc-gnats@gcc.gnu.org
Subject: Re: c/4270: quoted ctrl M breaks parser
Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2001 15:21:48 -0700

 On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 09:46:26PM -0000, george@palisad.com wrote:
 > When a '^M' occurs as a character, i.e.
 > 
 > 	*c == '^M'
 > 
 > the parser breaks.  The string ^M represents an
 > octal 015 character and was inserted from emacs
 > by quoting a ctrl M.
 
 I am going to assume that "the parser breaks" means that you see the
 compiler issue a series of syntax errors on this code, because that's
 what I get for similar code:
 
 test.c:1:10: missing terminating ' character
 test.c:1: empty character constant
 test.c:2:1: missing terminating ' character
 test.c:2: parse error before ';'
 
 In the future please be more precise about what the compiler did and
 what you think it should have done instead.
 
 The character with the octal value 015 in ASCII is CARRIAGE RETURN.
 Some computer systems use this character to indicate the end of a
 line.  To maximize interoperability, GCC recognizes CARRIAGE RETURN as
 the end of a line no matter what system it has been built for.
 
 If you want octal 015 as a character constant, write '\015'.  If you
 want CARRIAGE RETURN, which is not necessarily octal 015 in all
 encodings, write '\r'.
 
 There is no way to write "the character generated by the operating
 system when the user types control-M" in ISO C, but libraries such as
 ncurses offer this information.
 
 zw