Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!taumet!steve
From: steve@taumet.com (Stephen Clamage)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: Comment Syntax
Message-ID: <521@taumet.com>
Date: 18 Nov 90 01:01:36 GMT
References: <14390@smoke.brl.mil> <48.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.COM> <1990Nov13.181856.17322@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
Organization: Taumetric Corporation, San Diego
Lines: 18

wald@theory.lcs.mit.edu (David Wald) writes:

>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?

We don't have an actual standard for C++ yet, but E&S specifies (16.1)
that trigraphs and escaped newlines are processed before comments.
This is the same as in ANSI C, except that C++ also has the //-style
comment.  If ANSI C were to adopt //-style comments, I assume it
would use the same rule, since anything else would violate the
existing phases of translation.  The idea is to allow machine-generated
code to fold at any convenient point on systems with line-length
limitations, and not have to parse the code to figure out where was
a safe place.
-- 

Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve@taumet.com