Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uniwa!wacsvax!chris
From: chris@wacsvax.OZ (chris mcdonald)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re^2: Why nested comments not allowed?
Message-ID: <1523@wacsvax.OZ>
Date: 16 Feb 90 05:42:37 GMT
References: <236100027@prism> <1414@amethyst.math.arizona.edu>
Organization: Comp Sci, Uni. Western Australia.
Lines: 28

raw@math.arizona.edu (Rich Walters) writes:

>In article <236100027@prism> ly@prism.TMC.COM writes:
>>
>>	I'm just curious to know why nested comments are not allowed in many 
>>	languages.

>Nested comments are not supported because it is difficult to tell where the
>nesting ends.  Have you ever written a paren checker in C? (in any language?)

>Reason 2) Why waste the computing power??  After all, it's only a comment!!

What a stupid response!
I don't know why they are not supported but agree that they are damn
useful. They are easy to parse in syntactically correct programs (ever
heard of counting?) and, after all, the computer/compiler is supposed to
do what we tell it, not for us to bow down and minimize its work.
If its really too hard for you to count comments I'll sell you a little
parser for a ridiculous amount.

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Chris McDonald.

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