I'm trying to pass a string using the C51 DEFINE directive from command line. i.e. DEFINE(SERIAL="FOOBAR")
When compiling, it is converted to an identifier (FOOBAR) instead of remaining as a string literal ("FOOBAR"). Is there a way to force it to remain as a string literal?
How are you passing that command line to C51? Are you sure the tool you're using for that (cmd shell, IDE, Makefile, ...) isn't stripping the quotes, believing they were meant for that tool to deal with, rather than C51? Probably the easiest way of checking this is in the list files: at their top they document the actual command line C51 was invoked with. See if the quotes survived until that point. If it didn't, you need to check your other tools.
Quotes are notoriously tricky to pass into C compilations from the outside --- every 'make', IDE, and compiler has its own quirk. So odds are you would be better off checking hard if you really need to do this at all. The stringization operator of the preprocessor (#macro) might help you work around that.
Yes, I have had problems with the (mis)interpretation of quotes by uVision.
It was a long time ago - I have no idea if it's been fixed...
Look at the list file, the quotes are indeed stripped by the compiler.
Try to use backslash '\' on Makefile, command line, and IDE, but it still don't work on all cases. The compiler just strip the quote.
It's not necessarily the Compiler that's doing it - it might be uVision stripping the quotes before they get to the compiler...?
Or it might be something else that happens betwen uVision and the compiler...
Have you tried doubling-up the quotes; eg,
DEFINE(SERIAL=""FOOBAR"")