Re: socket.h

[Paul Eggert]

Jim Meyering <address@hidden> writes:

> I find that those parentheses provide no benefit.  Although coreutils
> doesn't use that module, it might be worthwhile to start following the
> same guideline in gnulib.

I've never run into a compiler that didn't support "defined FOO", and
I don't see any technical reason to prefer the parentheses.

As it happens, over the weekend I replaced "defined (FOO)" with
"defined FOO" in the Bison source code; see
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bison-patches/2006-01/msg00085.html>.
This was inspired by my port of the coreutils sc_useless_cpp_parens
check, which I recently added to Bison.

I had left the parentheses in for many years because I thought some
ancient compilers might have required them, and Bison-generated
parsers ought to be very conservative.  But I checked the source code
to the Unix Version 7 cpp, dated 1979-01-10, and it it supports
"defined FOO" as well as "defined (FOO)".  That convinced me that the
parens weren't ever needed.