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From: andersa@kuling.UUCP (Anders Andersson)
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: # comment character
Message-ID: <764@kuling.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 25-Jun-85 01:33:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: kuling.764
Posted: Tue Jun 25 01:33:28 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 29-Jun-85 01:50:21 EDT
References: <291@ucdavis.UUCP>
Reply-To: andersa@kuling.UUCP (Anders Andersson)
Distribution: net
Organization: The Royal Inst. of Techn., Stockholm
Lines: 14

In article <291@ucdavis.UUCP> ccrrick@ucdavis.UUCP (Rick Heli) writes:
>Can anyone tell me why the # character is a comment in INTERACTIVE
>mode in the shell?  I mean, who goes around making comments that
>will never be seen again while running the shell in interactive
>mode?

Well, what function should # have in interactive mode then?
No function is also a kind of function. The idea is that things should
work the same regardless of mode -- imagine the problems if commands,
syntax etc. didn't behave the same when run from a file rather than
being typed in interactively. The consequent behaviour makes both
learning and debugging easy. Giving # a special "interactive" function
would merely increase documentation size and human brain load, instead
of functionality...