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From: wald@theory.lcs.mit.edu (David Wald)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Comment Syntax
Message-ID: <1990Nov13.181856.17322@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 13 Nov 90 18:18:56 GMT
References: <14390@smoke.brl.mil> <48.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.COM>
Sender: daemon@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu (Lucifer Maleficius)
Reply-To: wald@theory.lcs.mit.edu (David Wald)
Organization: Laboratory for Computer Science, MIT
Lines: 31

In article <48.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.COM> rex@aussie.COM (Rex Jaeschke) writes:
>> In article <HAGERMAN.90Nov7193212@rx7.ece.cmu.edu> hagerman@ece.cmu.edu (John Hagerman) writes:
>> >Why didn't // ... newline comments make it into ANSI C?
>> 
>
>Let me suggest that you CANNOT add // comments to an ANSI C compiler 
>WITHOUT some hacking. Consider the following example:
>
>int i;	// this comment ends in a backslash \
>int j;
>
>f()
>{
>	i = j;	/* error: j is not declared */
>} 
>
>ANSI's phases of translation require that backslash/new-lines be 
>processed BEFORE comments. In this case the 2 declaration lines would 
>become:
>
>int i;	// this comment ends in a backslash int j;

How much of a problem would this be?  It would mean that \\\n behaves
the same in comments as outside them, but that is already the case.
What do BCPL or C++ do with a comment like this?

-David
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David Wald                                           wald@theory.lcs.mit.edu
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