-
Block comments
/* */
are not supported, use line comments//
. -
You cannot put multiple statements on one line.
Semicolons are allowed at the end of the line, but no code can follow them. -
There are no
++
or--
operators. Use+= 1
and-= 1
. -
Pointer types are declared using the
pointer.
prefix, not*
suffix. To dereference them, usep[0]
instead of*p
. -
There is no unary
&
operator. Pointers to an object are acquired using the.pointer
suffix. Raw addresses are acquired using the.addr
suffix. The numeric values of the pointer and of the raw address may differ. -
Operator precedence works differently. Bitwise and bit-shifting operators have the same precedence as arithmetic operators, and mixing different operators with the same precedence is usually forbidden. This prevents most ambiguities in bit-twiddling code, but requires care when porting code from or to C.
-
There is no
!
operator. The negation is expressed as thenot
function. -
The modulo operator is written
%%
. As with/
, it's only defined for unsigned division. -
The
for
loops are range-based. Arbitrary, C-likefor
loops are not supported. -
Variable declaration and initialization have to be separate.
-
Integer literals starting with zero and containing just digits are decimal, not octal. For octal literals, use the
0o
prefix. -
String literals are not null-terminated by default. Use the
z
suffix for null-terminated strings.
Note: this is the opposite of what KickC does! Keep this in mind when migrating KickC code to Millfork or the other way around. -
In
if
,do/while
,while
andfor
statements, parentheses are not required, but braces are. Theelse
branch also requires braces, unless the only statement in theelse
block is anif
statement. -
There has to be a space between many operators and character literals, as the parser may treat the apostrophe as a part of the operator.
-
The preprocessor cannot expand symbols to something more complex than an identifier or a literal.
-
The preprocessor cannot define symbols for use in other files.
-
The closest to C's
#define
is#use
. Unlike#define
, such definitions are not visible within the preprocessor. -
Directives like
#use
and#pragma
affect the entire file, not just the code after the directive. -
The preprocessor cannot include files.
-
There is no automatic integer promotion. An operation of two bytes will yield a byte. For example:
byte a byte b word w w = a * b
may yield unexpected results. To prevent this, cast at least one argument:
w = word(a) * b
This issue applies mostly to the
*
and<<
operators. -
There is no padding in structs, except before fields whose type is a struct or a union with a non-trivial alignment.