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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c
Subject: Re: comment style
Message-ID: <17444:Jan804:03:3291@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 8 Jan 91 04:03:32 GMT
References: <1991Jan04.164355.15674@sco.COM> <1991Jan05.194321.12428@kithrup.COM>
Organization: IR
Lines: 19

In article <1991Jan05.194321.12428@kithrup.COM> sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes:
> 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 == '\\')

But that's the beauty of end-of-line comments: You *automatically*
delete everything, including the newline itself. // is both the comment
mechanism and the continuation mechanism. All characters past //,
through the newline, are ignored.

Apparently Microsoft C doesn't do this right. Oh, well.

> X3J11's job was to standardize *C*, not change it.

Agreed. I don't think they should have added //, or trigraphs, or
prototypes, or noalias. But // is still better than /* */.

---Dan