4.3.2 Special Characters

There are a few characters that are special in certain contexts. Within a macro body, the character & is used for token concatenation. To use the bitwise & operator within a macro body, escape it by using && instead. In a macro argument list, the angle brackets < and > are used to quote macro arguments.

Other special characters are described below.

Table 4-1. Special Characters and Usage
CharacterCharacter DescriptionSyntax Usage
.periodbegins a directive
;semicolonbegins a single-line comment
/*slash, asteriskbegins a multiple-line comment
*/asterisk, slashends a multiple-line comment
:colonends a label definition
#poundbegins a literal value
’c’character in single quotesspecifies a single character value
"string"character string in double quotesspecifies a character string