Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site tove.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!seismo!umcp-cs!tove!mark From: mark@tove.UUCP (Mark Weiser) Newsgroups: net.lang.c Subject: Re: Re: Standardization questions -- nested comments Message-ID: <14@tove.UUCP> Date: Sat, 13-Oct-84 22:08:41 EDT Article-I.D.: tove.14 Posted: Sat Oct 13 22:08:41 1984 Date-Received: Mon, 15-Oct-84 01:39:38 EDT References: <12931@sri-arpa.UUCP> Organization: U of Maryland, Laboratory for Parallel Computation, C.P., MD Lines: 23 > From: William LeFebvre> > > Has anyone considered making /* and */ nest properly, so that one could > > comment out commented code?? > > The best and most widely accepted way to prevent a block of code from > being compiled while still leaving the code in the file is as follows: > > #ifdef notdef The serious problem with no nesting is that whether or not a comment will work or net depends on the context. The #ifdef method is ugly, and only works for sure if you never use comments or keep them real short. If there is any chance that a comment may be lurking around, one cannot just stick a comment string into a C file without checking an arbitrarily large amount of context information to see if there is another comment that it will mung. This sort of global checking is just the sort of things I hate to do, but computers are good at. Let's hear it for compiler support for nested comments. -- Spoken: Mark Weiser ARPA: mark@maryland CSNet: mark@umcp-cs UUCP: {seismo,allegra}!umcp-cs!mark U.S.: Computer Science Dept., University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742