[brianon99]

Things have changed over the years. Even if the developers have patched gcc, or "own" gcc, linux still have to be built with gcc 4.4 otherwise many distro will have problems, so it does not solve the problem.

Moreover, change the semantics of C as you have suggested will break other non-linux-kernele existing programs. There may exists programs depending on the K&R version of max with side effect. Who nows?

[mjw1007]

I think asking the GCC developers for a builtin form of __is_constant would be a sensible step, so that the worst of those macros can eventually be retired.