Tokenization and preprocessing

Probably the least specified part of previous versions of C concerned the operations that transformed each source file from a bunch of characters into a sequence of tokens, ready to parse. These operations included recognition of white space (including comments), bundling consecutive characters into tokens, handling preprocessing directive lines, and macro replacement. However, their respective ordering was never guaranteed.

This section is organized as follows:

• ``ANSI C translation phases''

• ``Old C translation phases''

• ``Logical source lines''

• ``Macro replacement''

• ``Stringizing''

• ``Token pasting''