Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!bu-cs!buengc!bph
From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: comment token mistake
Message-ID: <2722@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 30 Apr 89 08:17:39 GMT
References: <2423@solo5.cs.vu.nl>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.lang.c
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 26

In article <2423@solo5.cs.vu.nl> maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath) writes:
>The choice of the 2-token sequence `/*' for starting a comment, was a mistake:
>
>	printf("%d\n", *a/*b);
>

Maarten...%-/...

Bait?  From you?

Acshully, and I'm certain this is going to balloon into the biggest
silly-thread in comp.lang.c this year, I often wonder what the trugurus
were thinking when they chose something so odd to be a comment-delimiter.

I mean, the "big-C in column one" of Fortran makes more sense, viscerally,
if (certainly) not lexically.

Perhaps it was just theirs-by-fiat, having fallen from an earlier
incarnation of the language ("B", "C--", I dunno.), or perhaps it was
a sarcastic comment (PUN!!) on the `(*' stuff that Pascal was shedding.

Personally, I'm waiting for a language that recognizes its own syntax
easily enough to avoid parsing comments, delimiters or no.

				--Blair
				  "Where's my lollipop?"