Comment Syntax
Henry Spencer
henry at zoo.toronto.edu
Wed Nov 14 04:53:13 AEST 1990
In article <48.UUL1.3#5077 at aussie.COM> rex at aussie.COM (Rex Jaeschke) writes:
>Let me suggest that you CANNOT add // comments to an ANSI C compiler
>WITHOUT some hacking. Consider the following example:
>
>int i; // this comment ends in a backslash \
>int j;
> ...
>So, for a future version of ANSI C to adopt //, they would have to
>either rearrange the phases of translation (unlikely since that would
>no longer be backwards compatible) or to treat // and /**/ comments
>differently and add a new phase for //.
Um, why? In ANSI C, this program fragment is illegal -- a syntax error --
and the standard does not constrain responses to syntax errors. If //
comments were added, some programs that are now syntactically erroneous
would become legal, but that is true of many types of extension. I don't
see the problem.
--
"I don't *want* to be normal!" | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
"Not to worry." | henry at zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
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