Maximum length of statement in C
c, gcc
Solution
The standard specifies a minimum translation limit:
c11
5.2.4.1 Translation limits
1 The implementation shall be able to translate and execute at least one program that contains at least one instance of every one of the following limits:
[...]
— 4095 characters in a logical source line
The standard recommends however that "implementations should avoid imposing fixed translation limits whenever possible".
A logical source line is the result of backslash-newline splicing (5.1.1.2:1.2), so this doesn't directly cover the minimum limit for the number of characters in a statement.
However, because another translation limit requirement is:
— 4095 characters in a string literal (after concatenation)
and as string literals may only occur in statements, it follows that the implementation must accept at least one 4095-character statement.
Ignoring literals, we also see:
— 127 arguments in one function call
and as a function call must include at least 2 characters per argument, plus 4 for the invocation (`f(0,0,...);`) we arrive at a minimum line length limit of 260.
Problem
Is there a maximum length for a statement defined in C? compiler is gcc