Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!mordor!sri-spam!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Power proposal for ANSI C
Message-ID: <547@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 18 Jan 88 05:23:39 GMT
References: <38384@sun.uucp> <3573@sdcc6.ucsd.EDU> <434@drilex.UUCP>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 29
Summary: tip

In article <434@drilex.UUCP>, dricej@drilex.UUCP (Craig Jackson) writes:
> 
>    a = b/*c;
> 
> My friend spent two days looking for that one...

When I've spent more than a few minutes on such a problem
I use 'cc -E foo.c | cb' or 'cc -E foo.c | indent' depending on
which system I'm on to see exactly what the preprocessor has
done with it.  This strips out comments too, which is why it's
a good dodge for this kind of problem.  (Couldn't happen in BCPL...)

On UNIX, it's a good idea to have a little script around:

#!/bin/sh
#NAME        badcom
#SYNOPSIS    badcom foobaz.c
#DESCRIPTION Finds (some) suspicious comment lines, namely
#	     lines where /* occurs, is not the first thing
#	     on its line, and hasn't got */ on the same line,
#	     also lines where */ occurs, is not the last
#	     thing on the line, and hasn't got /* on the
#	     same line
#OPTIONS     none
#BUGS        Doesn't know about ".." or #if 0
#	     Misses other kinds of comment error
egrep -n -e '[^ \t].*/\*|\*/.*[^ \t]' $1 | \
egrep -v -e '/\*.*\*/'

{When entering this script, replace \t by actual TAB characters.}