Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/17/84; site opus.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!hao!cires!nbires!opus!rcd From: rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) Newsgroups: net.lang.c Subject: Re: Standardization questions -- nested comments Message-ID: <886@opus.UUCP> Date: Thu, 11-Oct-84 21:55:28 EDT Article-I.D.: opus.886 Posted: Thu Oct 11 21:55:28 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 13-Oct-84 04:02:11 EDT References: <12904@sri-arpa.UUCP> Organization: NBI,Inc, Boulder CO Lines: 31 One recent idea was to have an occurrence of "/*" within a comment generate a warning. I suppose I could live with that as long as I can shut off the warning (since I would use an alias or some such to disable it all the time). Another suggestion: > From: Paul Schauble> > Has anyone considered making /* and */ nest properly, so that one could > comment out commented code?? It bothers me a little that it seems necessary to start complicating the structure of comments. For C, I really think we can live with what we've got. In another language design, there are probably better ways to go--such as Ada's "--" which is ALWAYS terminated at end of line. (Commenting out a section of code is easy; just prefix each line with --.) Another approach is to have two forms such as (* *) vs { } in Pascal BUT don't allow matching (* with } or { with *)--this is clumsier but can be made to work. Examining the interior of comments CAN get in the way. Once upon a time there was a not-quite-brilliant idea that Pascal compilers should make an effort to detect an unclosed comment. (I think it was in one of the drafts of the Standard; I have no idea whether it stayed.) This begat some odd solutions--one of the worst being a compiler warning on any occurrence of a semicolon within a comment. Of course, if you write normal text in comments you'll punctuate it and the compiler makes a lot of racket. So you turn off warning messages and miss all of the nice things like "this variable is probably used before it is set." -- Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086 ...Relax...don't worry...have a homebrew.