This one bit me today

[dougp at voodoo.ucsb.edu]

-Message-Text-Follows-
In article <7734 at cg-atla.UUCP>, fredex at cg-atla.UUCP (Fred Smith) writes...
>FLAME ON:
> 
>Just because C allows you to write terse, dense code, doesn't mean you should
>actually DO it!
> 
>A much better (not to mention, more readable) way to write that would be:
>FLAME OFF:
> 
> 
>Fred
FLAME ON:
Fred, you are a twit for flaming me on a matter of prefeference.
FLAME OFF:

I was pointing out a flaw in the grammer of C not pushing any style of
code. I happen to find that equations with no spaces are easier to read.
If you don't like that, DON'T READ MY CODE.

The real point of my message was that /* was a bad choice for the
opening of a comment because it can appear in normal code and not
be intended to be the start of a comment.

You can have a**p, a+*p, a-*p but not a/*p this is an inconsistancy
in the grammar. This wouldn't have been so bad but for a bug in
the Microsoft C compiler such that:

// c=a/*p;
   e=f*q;   /*comment*/

causes the statment e=f*p; to be commented out. the /* in the line
commented out by // is seen as the beginning of the comment. This made
localizing the error an hour job.

Douglas Peale