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From: chapman@eris.berkeley.edu (Brent Chapman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: C++ Comments
Message-ID: <24700@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 22 May 89 17:54:03 GMT
References: <6957@brunix.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: chapman@eris.berkeley.edu (Brent Chapman)
Organization: UNIXversity of California at Berkeley
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In article <6957@brunix.UUCP> sdm@cs.brown.edu (Scott Meyers) writes:
>Consider the following C++ source line:
>
>    //**********************
>
>How should this be treated by the C++ compiler?  The GNU g++ compiler
>treats this as a comment-to-EOL followed by a bunch of asterisks, but the
>AT&T compiler treats it as a slash followed by an open-comment delimiter.
>I want the former interpretation, and I can't find anything in Stroustrup's
>book which indicates that any other interpretation is to be expected.

I'm new to C++, but C has always used a "greedy" parsing algorithm (that is,
it always takes the longest possible next token); I don't know why C++ would
do otherwise.  From K&R, p. 179:

    If the input stream has been parsed into tokens up to a given character,
    the next token is taken to include the longest string of characters which
    could possibly constitute a token.

g++ is doing the right thing, and the AT&T compiler is wrong.


-Brent
--
Brent Chapman					Capital Market Technology, Inc.
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