C90 had constraints requiring # and ## tokens to only appear in preprocessing directives, but C99 and later removed those constraints, so this code is no longer necessary when targeting current languages versions. (It would be necessary in a "strict C90" mode, if that was ever implemented.)
The main practical effect of this is that # and ## tokens can be passed as parameters to macros, provided the macro either ignores or stringizes that parameter. # and ## tokens still have no role in the grammar of the C language after preprocessing, so they will be an unexpected token and produce some kind of error if they appear anywhere.
This also contains a change to ensure that a line containing one or more illegal characters (e.g. $) and then a # is not treated as a preprocessing directive.
The branch range calculation treated dcl directives as taking 2 bytes rather than 4, which could result in out-of-range branches. These could result in linker errors (for forward branches) or silently generating wrong code (for backward branches).
This patch now treats dcb, dcw, and dcl as separate directives in the native-code layer, so the appropriate length can be calculated for each.
Here is an example of code affected by this:
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
top:
if (!argc) { /* this caused a linker error */
asm {
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
dcl 0
}
goto top; /* this generated bad code with no error */
}
}
