Directives in comments

[Reino de Boer]

compata at cup.portal.com (David H Close) writes:

>[...text deleted...] This appears
>to be consistent with K&R (1978), which states on page 207, "These lines
>[beginning with a #] have syntax independent of the rest of the language;
>they may appear anywhere and have effect which lasts (independent of scope)
>until the end of the source program file."

>The following program fragment appears to conform to the rules stated.

>	/*
>	 *            Program heading
>	 #define hdr "Program name"
>	 *            end of heading
>	 */
>	main () { printf(hdr); }

>K&R's assertion that directives "have syntax independent of the rest of
>the language" would appear to me to allow the example.

In K&R Second Edition pp. 228--229, A12. Preprocessing:
	3. The program is split into tokens separated by white-space
	characters; comments are replaced by a single space. Then
				^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^(only then)
	preprocessing directives are obeyed, and macros (...) are expanded.

Hope this explains -- Reino

-- 
Reino R. A. de Boer
Erasmus University Rotterdam ( Informatica )
e-mail: reino at cs.eur.nl