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From: sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: comment style
Message-ID: <1991Jan05.194321.12428@kithrup.COM>
Date: 5 Jan 91 19:43:21 GMT
References: <1991Jan04.164355.15674@sco.COM>
Organization: Kithrup Enterprises, Ltd.
Lines: 40

In article <1991Jan04.164355.15674@sco.COM> ron@scocan.sco.COM (Ron Irvine) writes:
>The actual program that contained this problem was very complex.
>It took two of us a day to figure out what had happened.

I would have run it through the preprocessor to figure out what was going
on.  Shouldn't have taken too long.

>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.

Fine.  Please show me an existing C compiler that handles this.  Please tell
me how you are going to handle

	// we want to see if the character is a \
	if (c == '\\')

Is the if statement part of the comment, or not?  In C comments, no
characters are special.  /lib/cpp says that

	/*
	This is a comment?
	/\
	*

results in an unterminated comment, while msc and gcc both accept it.

X3J11's job was to standardize *C*, not change it.  They added trigraphs,
and nobody is happy with them.  They added prototypes, and people like them.
They added noalias, and god himself (dmr 8-)) bore his wrath down upon them.

I know of only one C compiler that accepts //-style comments:  Microsoft C,
versions 5.0 and later.

-- 
Sean Eric Fagan  | "I made the universe, but please don't blame me for it;
sef@kithrup.COM  |  I had a bellyache at the time."
-----------------+           -- The Turtle (Stephen King, _It_)
Any opinions expressed are my own, and generally unpopular with others.