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Asked: 2026-05-26T22:45:42+00:00

I am trying to port some relatively modern C code to an older compiler.

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I am trying to port some relatively modern C code to an older compiler.

This compiler (DICE), it seems, chokes on the first header file and the first occurrence of this idiom:

#ifndef SOMETHING
#define SOMETHING

...  

#endif /* SOMETHING */

it dies on the second line in the header with:
DCPP: "../../code/someheader.h" L:2 C:0 Error:39 Syntax Error

Changing to #define SOMETHING 1 made no difference.

So I have really two questions, am I using DICE with the wrong option or something, or did C programmers use some other idiom equal to ifndef-define back in the old days?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If it is this C compiler then by looking at the sources (src\dcpp\cpp.c) you can see that newlines only include the carriage return character and not the linefeed character.

    If you have a line ending with CRLF then when the compiler strips the whitespace at the start of the line, it does not strip the linefeed before the # which is a syntax error, since preprocessor directives starting with # must be the first non-whitespace character in the line.

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