Re: recursive comments and Re: Techniques for writing an interpreter

On 20 Mar 1998 11:40:54 -0500, Peter Sestoft <sestoft@ellemose.dina.kvl.dk> wrote:
>Stefan Monnier <monnier@tequila.cs.yale.edu> writes:
> (1) What languages allow recursive comments ?
>
> (2) What languages enforce a "lexing" of the content of comments
> (so that an end-comment inside a string inside a comment is ignored) ?
>
> [C does if you count #if 0 as a comment. -John]
>
>Right on (1) but not on (2) --- as far as I can see.


Actually, our Esteemed Moderator is right on both counts. Officially,
even code which is #ifdefed out goes through the lexer, although ISTR
encountering a few cpps which don't follow that rule.


As an example, the following should be accepted by the preprocessor
(gcc's accepts it):


    #if 0
    "/*"
    #endif


I discovered this back when I was younger and more foolish, when I
tried to use #if 0 for all of my comments in a program. The
preprocessor got rather upset by an unmatched ''' within a comment:


    #if 0
    That's a shame.
    #endif


Seth
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