If you want to use (-: and :-) as your comment delimiters, then you have to use something like "sed" to preprocess the code. Here's the sequence of commands you need to execute: sed -e 's/(-:/\/*/g' -e 's/:-)/*\//g' <source.c >xxx.c mv xxx.c source.c cc -c source.c Don't forget the "mv". It is the most critical part of getting the C right :-)