Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!philmds!leo
From: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: request for C comment stripper
Message-ID: <989@philmds.UUCP>
Date: 23 Mar 89 07:43:01 GMT
References: <5693@ux.cs.man.ac.uk> <985@philmds.UUCP> <5695@ux.cs.man.ac.uk>
Reply-To: leo@philmds.UUCP (Leo de Wit)
Organization: Philips I&E DTS Eindhoven
Lines: 21

In article <5695@ux.cs.man.ac.uk> ian@mucs.UUCP (Ian Cottam) writes:
|According to my understanding of the pANS C preprocessor and the
|notion of a "translation unit", your example is erroneous as the
|comment must be terminated within startcom.h.  (As a practical
|man I also confirmed my suspicion with the help of gcc :-) )

OK, if your stripper is pANS conforming (whatever that means) it
should handle trigraphs too (it doesn't). If it isn't, then, being
a practical man, try and test my sample program on an Ultrix 2.x C
compiler (4.3 BSD will probably do too). It'll compile just fine.

|However, I suspect someone can come up with a case that will
|throw my lex script as comment-strippers always require more
|thought than people can believe possible.

That's exactly the point I'm trying to make all the time: it shouldn't
be difficult, it isn't entirely trivial however (it may even depend on
the version of pANS you're reading; look for instance for /* in include
file names, compare the Feb '87 and May '88 drafts).

   Leo.