Wave is our C++ preprocessor, but preprocessing is the third phase of translating a file. (Looking at section 2.1 in the standard). I have a gut feeling that all the compilers out there mush the first three phases together in parsing a file. Glancing over the Wave docs gives me the same impression about it. Are either one of these feelings accurate (this requires a separate answer for each parser)? If the answer for Wave is "yes", could we separate them, at least as an option? I feel that this is important so we can gain full understanding of each phases. It may be more complicated[1], and most likely slower, but it could represent a clean implementation. (BTW, what phases does Wave act like?) The first two[2] phases are: 1. Native characters that match basic source characters are converted as so (including line breaks). Trigraphs are expanded to basic source[3]. Other characters are turned into internal Unicode expansions (i.e. act like "\uXXXX" or \Uxxxxxxxx"[4]). 2. The backslash-newline soft line-break combination are collapsed, folding multiple native lines into one logical line. We should spit out an error if the folding creates Unicode escapes. For non-empty files, we need to spit out errors if the last line is not a hard line-break, either a non-newline character or a backslash-newline combination is forbidden. [1] Our "Wave-1" would convert the original text (iterators) into phase-1 tokens. Our "Wave-2" would convert phase-1 token (iterators) into phase-2 tokens, etc. Remember that any file-name and line/column positions will have to be passed through each phase. [2] I thought Wave just did phase-3, with phases 1 and 2 thrown in at the same time. But now I'm not sure which phase Wave stops at. I don't think it can go past phase-4, because doing phase-5 needs knowledge of the destination platform. [3] Only '?' characters that are part of a valid trigraph sequence are converted; all others are left unchanged. [4] But actual "\uXXXX" resolution doesn't happen until phase 5! -- Daryle Walker Mac, Internet, and Video Game Junkie darylew AT hotmail DOT com