Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!ames!oliveb!apple!rutgers!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Lisp-style comments
Message-ID: <10173@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 29 Apr 89 06:55:31 GMT
References: <3851@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <10150@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1338@ns.network.com>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 22

In article <1338@ns.network.com> ddb@ns.UUCP (David Dyer-Bennet) writes:
>Was it perhaps discussed or proposed, and finally turned down after feature
>freeze on those particular compilers?

Certainly //comment-to-end-of-line was proposed and discussed, but it
was never accepted for inclusion in the C standard because it never
was considered part of the official C language by anybody we know of.
One comment style is sufficient.

I first saw //comments supported by a C compiler in use at the Naval
Postgraduate School, and I thought it was sufficiently useful that
I added it to Geotronics Corp's PDP-11 C compiler and preprocessor.
It was useful all right, but when we had to upgrade to a VAX its C
compiler and preprocessor did not like our //comments.  Therefore I
was faced with the choice of insisting that every C compiler we ever
wanted to use be modified to support //comments, or else convert all
our source code into genuine //-free C.  I did the latter and
considered that I had learned a lesson.

//comments have since been seen in "C with classes" and its current
descendant C++.  It's convenient if you have it but if you're writing
C code that needs to be widely portable you dare not use this feature.