Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!bionet!ames!uhccux!munnari.oz.au!cs.mu.oz.au!ok
From: ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: quotes inside #if 0
Summary: nitpicking
Keywords: ANSI, comments
Message-ID: <2049@munnari.oz.au>
Date: 7 Sep 89 09:32:53 GMT
References: <2014@munnari.oz.au> <14512@haddock.ima.isc.com> <2023@munnari.oz.au> <766@ecrcvax.UUCP>
Sender: news@cs.mu.oz.au
Lines: 19

[I wrote]
: >> #if 0 ... [English text and C examples] ... #endif
: >>The compiler sees words like "don't" in the English text and snarls that
                                  ^^^^^
: >It is not at all coincidental.  There was never any suggestion in any book
: >that #if 0-ed code had to have balanced single quotes, and the only C
                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

In article <766@ecrcvax.UUCP>, diomidis@ecrcvax.UUCP (Diomidis Spinellis) writes:
> Vanilla pcc complains about unbalanced comments and undefined preprocessor
                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> controls inside #if 0 blocks.

I wasn't whining about unbalanced comments, just English text like "don't".
The bottom line is that my belief that #if 0 used to work in C is wrong, I
had just been lucky in never running into any of the nasty bits, and there
isn't any safe way of including large chunks of text in a C program.  Gad,
this makes F-----N look good.  To think that C is a descendant of BCPL,
which had //end-of-line comments.