On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, John Jetmore wrote:
> Hmm... I tried to find an online reference for that last night and was
> unable. The closest I found was a page on gcc.gnu.org which stated
> that __DATE__ was supposed to be replaced by the date. It also had a
> reference number which was probably to a section of the standard, but I
> never traced it down. If I had found it was against standard I wouldn't
> have reported it here (except perhaps as an oddity).
Try
http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG14/www/docs/n843.htm which seems to
be a working document for the next standard. But it contains the
relevant text about __DATE__.
I also found
http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/rat/title.html which is the
Rationale for the existing standard. It contains this:
The macros __DATE__ and __TIME__ have been added to make available the
time of translation. A particular format for the expansion of these
macros has been specified to aid in parsing strings initialized by
them.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
