quotes inside #if 0
Diomidis Spinellis
diomidis at ecrcvax.UUCP
Wed Sep 6 17:41:27 AEST 1989
In article <2023 at munnari.oz.au> ok at cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) writes:
>In article <2014 at munnari.oz.au> ok at cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) writes:
>> #if 0 ... [English text and C examples] ... #endif
>>The compiler sees words like "don't" in the English text and snarls that
>>these are unterminated character constants. This used to be perfectly
>>good C...
[...]
>It is not at all coincidental. There was never any suggestion in any book
>that #if 0-ed code had to have balanced single quotes, and the only C
>compiler I've ever come across (I've used about a dozen) that complains
>about it is the only one I've used that tries to be ANSI-compliant.
ecrcvax% cat t.c
#if 0
#funny_text
/*
#endif
ecrcvax% /bin/cc -c t.c
t.c: 2: undefined control
t.c: 5: unterminated comment
Vanila pcc complains about unbalanced comments and undefined preprocessor
controls inside #if 0 blocks. Commenting out arbitrary text with #if 0 is
not a safe practice for most compilers (both ANSI and classic C).
Diomidis
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