This is an unofficial snapshot of the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG21 Core Issues List revision 115f. See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/ for the official list.

2024-12-06


366. String literal allowed in integral constant expression?

Section: 7.7  [expr.const]     Status: CD1     Submitter: Martin v. Loewis     Date: 29 July 2002

[Voted into WP at October 2003 meeting.]

According to 15.2 [cpp.cond] paragraph 1, the if-group

#if "Hello, world"

is well-formed, since it is an integral constant expression. Since that may not be obvious, here is why:

7.7 [expr.const] paragraph 1 says that an integral constant expression may involve literals (5.13 [lex.literal]); "Hello, world" is a literal. It restricts operators to not use certain type conversions; this expression does not use type conversions. It further disallows functions, class objects, pointers, ... - this expression is none of those, since it is an array.

However, 15.2 [cpp.cond] paragraph 6 does not explain what to do with this if-group, since the expression evaluates neither to false(zero) nor true(non-zero).

Proposed resolution (October 2002):

Change the beginning of the second sentence of 7.7 [expr.const] paragraph 1 which currently reads

An integral constant-expression can involve only literals (5.13 [lex.literal]), ...
to say
An integral constant-expression can involve only literals of arithmetic types (5.13 [lex.literal], 6.8.2 [basic.fundamental]), ...