inconsistent macro behavior

[Reza Roboubi]

David Sveningsson wrote:
>> The questions are:
>> a.)  What's even going on here?  Why the apparent inconsistency?
>> b.)  What _should_ be the correct behavior, both in terms of the
>> (extended) GNU C language, and also the standard C language?

> 
> I believe that each c-style string must be encapsulated with " even for 
> the preprocessor to work. Actually, at least gcc-4.3 emits warnings 
> about missing termination for both line 1 and 2 in your test case.
> 
> Perhaps you could work something out with the ## concatenation operator?

Thanks for your replies.

So, double quotes are needed, but I'm still wondering why these behave 
differently:
$ gcc -Wall -E test.c
$ gcc -Wall -c test.c

I mean, what does the gcc back end do _differently_ for those two commands?
---------------------------------------
As a side note, I just checked Torvalds' sparse compiler, and 
interestingly, it returns:

test.c:2:1: warning: Newline in string or character constant
char * c = "llll\n#define y " y ;

In other words, it is amalgamating lines 1+2 into a single string 
literal.  However, sparse does this consistently, regardless of of 
whether I use sparse -E or sparse -c.  So, I can understand what it's doing.

Reza.