Standardization questions -- nested comments
Ron Natalie <ron>
ron at brl-tgr.ARPA
Thu Oct 18 06:03:05 AEST 1984
> The serious problem with no nesting is that whether or not a comment
> will work or net depends on the context.
Correct, and all you are doing is changing the context rules from one to
another by making comments nest.
> 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.
Eh? #ifdef only has the problem that C has in general, unterminated
comments. A lint warning about comment ambiguity is required whether
you nest or not.
If you don't nest (current):
/* COMMENT
comment_code; /* Comment in comment */
*/
The comment is terminated early and the */ is unexpected and generates
a comile error or
/* Comment missing end.
real_code; /* Comment */
No compile error results but read_code gets mysteriously deleted.
If you do nest:
/* Commented code /* commented comment */
real_code
rest of the file gets eaten (but doesn't if you use the current correct
syntax)... etc...
You probably need to be able to get nit-picking warnings about comments
in comments, comments unterminated at end of file, etc...
Just anot her gratuitous change to the C language that breaks existing
correct code and does not really solve any problems.
-Ron "Let's keep C, C." Natalie
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