Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsd!hub!dougp
From: dougp@voodoo.ucsb.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: This one bit me today
Message-ID: <2437@hub.UUCP>
Date: 6 Oct 89 03:40:29 GMT
Sender: news@hub.UUCP
Organization: UC, Santa Barbara. Physics Computer Services
Lines: 36

-Message-Text-Follows-
In article <7734@cg-atla.UUCP>, fredex@cg-atla.UUCP (Fred Smith) writes...
>FLAME ON:
> 
>Just because C allows you to write terse, dense code, doesn't mean you should
>actually DO it!
> 
>A much better (not to mention, more readable) way to write that would be:
>FLAME OFF:
> 
> 
>Fred
FLAME ON:
Fred, you are a twit for flaming me on a matter of prefeference.
FLAME OFF:

I was pointing out a flaw in the grammer of C not pushing any style of
code. I happen to find that equations with no spaces are easier to read.
If you don't like that, DON'T READ MY CODE.

The real point of my message was that /* was a bad choice for the
opening of a comment because it can appear in normal code and not
be intended to be the start of a comment.

You can have a**p, a+*p, a-*p but not a/*p this is an inconsistancy
in the grammar. This wouldn't have been so bad but for a bug in
the Microsoft C compiler such that:

// c=a/*p;
   e=f*q;   /*comment*/

causes the statment e=f*p; to be commented out. the /* in the line
commented out by // is seen as the beginning of the comment. This made
localizing the error an hour job.

Douglas Peale