Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!pilchuck!dataio!fnx!nazgul!bright
From: bright@nazgul.UUCP (Walter Bright)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Comment Syntax
Message-ID: <162@nazgul.UUCP>
Date: 15 Nov 90 20:23:32 GMT
References: <14390@smoke.brl.mil> <48.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.COM>
Reply-To: bright@nazgul.UUCP (Walter Bright)
Organization: Zortech, Seattle
Lines: 19

In article <48.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.COM> rex@aussie.COM (Rex Jaeschke) writes:
/int i;	// this comment ends in a backslash \
/int j;
/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;
/So, for a future version of ANSI C to adopt //, they would have to 
/either rearrange the phases of translation (unlikely since that would 
/no longer be backwards compatible) or to treat // and /**/ comments 
/differently and add a new phase for //.

There was some debate about this on BIX a while back. The consensus seemed
to be that the phases of translation were not modified to support //
comments. If you had a // comment that ended in a \, then the line got
spliced and the next line became part of the comment.

This is not a very onerous burden, if it really bugs someone they could always
use /* */ comments (in macros is where this problem crops up).