Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!think.com!barmar
From: barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: comment style
Message-ID: <1991Jan5.203530.20366@Think.COM>
Date: 5 Jan 91 20:35:30 GMT
References: <1991Jan04.164355.15674@sco.COM>
Sender: news@Think.COM
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
Lines: 24

In article <1991Jan04.164355.15674@sco.COM> ron@scocan.sco.COM (Ron Irvine) writes:
>The // comment style should have been adopted by the ANSI committee
>if for no other reason that to reduce the likelihood of a programmer
>falling into this horrendous trap. If // style comments had been
>used in the above program the compile would have failed.

And if they got rid of malloc and free then programmers wouldn't forget to
free storage....

Seriously, though, the purpose of a language standard is to support
portability of programs, not to hold the programmers' hands.

Also, it's quite likely that including // comments in the standard wouldn't
help so much, because many programmers wouldn't use them.  For quite some
time programmers will continue to be concerned with porting their programs
to non-ANSI compilers (the C compilers that are bundled with many popular
OSes (e.g. SunOS) aren't ANSI-compliant), so they'll use the more
compatible commenting style.

--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
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