Nested Comments in C -- A recent experience

[Karl Heuer]

In article <5418 at jarthur.Claremont.EDU> dfoster at jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Derek R. Foster) writes:
>In article <1990Mar18.045238.18224 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>>As has been explained at length, several times, this is a thoroughly bad
>>idea that programmers eventually learn to avoid.  It simply doesn't work
>>as well as #ifdef.
>
>You forgot to add "IN MY HUMBLE (or maybe not so humble, considering the
>above statement) OPINION!"

FACT: any modern C compiler will support #if...#endif, whereas comment nesting
is a local hack that happens to work on YOUR compiler.  In this sense, at
least, #if...#endif is a better choice.

Now, GIVEN that you like to program in a dialect that supports both
#if...#endif and comment nesting, and that you don't care about porting code
containing nested comments to Standard C, I suppose it's a matter of opinion
which one works better.

My OPINION is that #if...#endif is still a better choice, since it avoids
having to worry about how the local dialect handles quote-and-comment mixing,
and since it allows me to specify a condition to enable/disable the section of
code without having to edit the program source.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (karl at ima.ima.isc.com or harvard!ima!karl), The Walking Lint