Nested Comments in C -- A recent experience

[Alan J Rosenthal]

dfoster at jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Derek R. Foster) writes:
>I don't hear about anybody claiming that languages which support typeof() or
>__handle pointers, or other extensions that don't appear in the standard are
>"not C".  Instead, they are "Dialects of C".

Creating a keyword `__handle' is backward-compatible with C, in the sense that
all correct C programs will continue to exhibit the same behaviour (because
user identifiers may not begin with `__').

Adding `typeof' is almost backward-compatible, and will work so long as this
identifier is not otherwise used.  It should have been `__typeof'.

Adding that nested comments idea will probably break about 10 or 15 per cent of
all programs with a non-trivial maintenance history.  It is not C.  Also, none
of these other changes are lexical-level changes.

ajr

--
"Learning algorithms from Knuth is almost as bad as learning physics from
 Newton in the Latin original."                     -- Jeffrey Kegler