Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!austin
From: austin@bucsf.bu.edu (Austin Ziegler)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: This one bit me today
Message-ID: <41063@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 24 Oct 89 15:54:47 GMT
References: <2432@hub.UUCP> <568@sppy00.UUCP> <750@philmtl.philips.ca>
	<41019@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <2509@munnari.oz.au>
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Organization: Boston University College of Engineering
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In-reply-to: ok@cs.mu.oz.au's message of 24 Oct 89 09:20:32 GMT

>>>>> On 24 Oct 89 09:20:32 GMT, ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) said:

RO> In article <41019@bu-cs.BU.EDU>, austin@bucsf.bu.edu (Austin Ziegler) writes:
>    I read the rest of your article, but this is the one part I have
> problems with.  I am originally a Pascal programmer, and have been
> programming in C for enough time to acquaint myself with the language.  In
> Pascal, one of the nicest features for debugging is nested comments.

RO> Er, there's something your best friend should have told you: Pascal
RO> comments DO NOT NEST.  Neither in the ANSI standard, nor the ISO
RO> standard, nor Jensen & Wirth, nor either of the Pascal compilers I just
RO> checked (although one of them prints a warning if it sees '(*' inside
RO> '(*').

     Every pascal compiler I have seen accepts both '{' and '(*' as
characters which start comments.  That means you could have a { (* *) }
comment or a (* { } *) comment.  Beyond that, Pascal DOES NOT NEST.  Even
though they are two different sets of characters, they both delimit
comments.  Another point in case for multiple forms is '[]' and '(..)'.
Followups directed to comp.lang.pascal before this gets too far out of the
range of C.

	  Elminster, the Sage of Shadowdale (austin@bucsf.bu.edu)
	       700 Commonwealth Box 2094, Boston, MA  02215
				     
	       (* This is a { nested } comment in Pascal. *)