Path: utzoo!censor!geac!jtsv16!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!ATHENA.MIT.EDU!swick
From: swick@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ralph R. Swick)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Resource file question
Message-ID: <8911102329.AA21718@LYRE.MIT.EDU>
Date: 10 Nov 89 23:29:13 GMT
References: <8911102008.AA02303@cherry.atherton.com>
Organization: DEC/MIT Project Athena
Lines: 11

> Is the character to introduce a comment in a resource file a '!' or '#' 
> or either?

Officially, it's supposed to be '!'.  The confusion is that '#' was
used in X10 but when X11 was being built, it became clear that
allowing an xrdb-like program to use cpp (or at least cpp syntax)
would be a big win.  The Xlib implementation supported '#' silently
for backward compatibility with old users but neglected to also
ignore '!'.  This bug is fixed in R4.  Nothing really bad happens
if you use an "unsupported" comment character except wasted memory
at runtime.