These were previously treated as having type int. This resulted in incorrect results from sizeof, and would also be a problem for _Generic if it was implemented.
Note that this creates a token kind of "charconst", but this is not the kind for character constants in the source code. Those have type int, so their kind is intconst. The new kinds of "tokens" are created only through casts of constant expressions.
This means that floating-point constants can now have the range and precision of the extended type (aka long double), and floating-point constant expressions evaluated within the compiler also have that same range and precision (matching expressions evaluated at run time). This new behavior is intended to match the behavior specified in the C99 and later standards for FLT_EVAL_METHOD 2.
This fixes the previous problem where long double constants and constant expressions of type long double were not represented and evaluated with the full range and precision that they should be. It also gives extra range and precision to constants and constant expressions of type double or float. This may have pluses and minuses, but at any rate it is consistent with the existing behavior for expressions evaluated at run time, and with one of the possible models of floating point evaluation specified in the C standards.
Currently, the actual values they can have are still constrained to the 32-bit range. Also, there are some bits of functionality (e.g. for initializers) that are not implemented yet.
Specifically, the following six punctuator tokens are now supported:
<: :> <% %> %: %:%:
These behave the same as the existing tokens [, ], {, }, #, and ## (respectively), apart from their spelling.
This can be useful when the full ASCII character set cannot easily be displayed or input (e.g. on the IIgs text screen with certain language settings).
Specifically, the following will now be tokenized as keywords:
_Alignas
_Alignof
_Atomic
_Bool
_Complex
_Generic
_Imaginary
_Noreturn
_Static_assert
_Thread_local
restrict
('inline' was also added as a standard keyword in C99, but ORCA/C already treated it as such.)
The parser currently has no support for any of these keywords, so for now errors will still be generated if they are used, but this is a first step toward adding support for them.
This allows the code to be displayed properly on GitHub and in modern text editors, which typically do not support the irregularly-spaced tab stops used for ORCA/M code. It also avoids any possibility of problems building the code if the SysTabs file is missing or has been customized with non-standard tab stops.