Re: perl

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From: Peter da Silva
Subject: Re: perl
Date: 12:48 on 22 Dec 2006
>   -spc (And least you think otherwise, there's plenty to hate in C, 
> but I'm
> 	afraid I've lived with it long enough to subconsciously work around
> 	its quirks ... )

Oh, let's dredge up some luscious C hate.

/* Comments /* Don't nest */

Which is doubly hateful when some bugger does a compiler that 
implements nested comments, so you have to start finding places where 
someone's commented out a declaration like so:

/*  int i; /* index */

And change it to

#if 0
     int i; /* index */
#endif

Except that another bugger has done this with a compiler that does 
nested comments somewhere else so  their code looks like

/*  int ilTruc; / * il'Tuccadore (the man of 1000 faces) */

and now you have

#if 0
	int ilTruc; / * il'Tuccadore (the man of 1000 faces) */
#endif

Which works fine (except that people who name variables after obscure 
jokes in Discworld books need pointy hate inserted nasally), except 
when you hit a compiler that follows Allman's design rather than 
Ritchie's and tokenizes the code inside #if...#endif instead of 
whacking it out in the preprocessor, and that "'" gives it conniptions. 
So now you have to go back through the code again...

BUT AT LEAST NOBODY OUT THERE IS SAYING THAT THIS IS A GOOD IDEA

I hope.

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