Programming in C: A Practical Approach, First Edition

Appendix C

Translation Limits

According to ANSI/ISO standard, each compiler conforming to the standard should be able to translate and execute a program that contains constructs subject to the following limits:

• 127 nesting levels of blocks
• 63 nesting levels of conditional inclusion
• 12 pointer, array and function declarators (in any combinations) modifying an arithmetic, structure, union or incomplete type in a declaration
• 63 nesting levels of parenthesized expressions within a full expression
• 63 significant characters in an internal identifier (i.e. with internal linkage) or a macro name
• 31 significant characters in an external identifier (i.e. external linkage)
• 4095 external identifiers in one translation unit (i.e. file)
• 511 identifiers ...