Re: perl

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From: Aaron Crane
Subject: Re: perl
Date: 19:00 on 22 Dec 2006
Peter da Silva writes:
> Oh, let's dredge up some luscious C hate.
> 
> /* Comments /* Don't nest */

Unlike in PostgreSQL, where C-ish-syntax comments _do_ nest:

  /*
  SELECT foo FROM /* XXX: need better table and column names */ tbl
  WHERE bar = '/*';
  */

Oh, hang on, that doesn't help at all.  Consider this a hate for PostgreSQL's
not-quite-C comments.

HEY, LANGUAGE DESIGNER!  DON'T ALLOW COMMENTS OF THE SAME SYNTAX TO NEST!

Now, a C implementation that warns you when it finds a /* sequence inside a
/*...*/ comment is definitely a good thing.  I might even go so far as to
describe as hateful an implementation that doesn't do that by default.  Even
better would be for the language to forbid /* inside a
/*...*/ comment, but that's another story.

> #if 0
> 	int ilTruc; / * il'Tuccadore (the man of 1000 faces) */
> #endif
> 
> Which works fine [...] 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,

Such a compiler is buggy.  There's a reason the standard says the compiler
must behave as if it goes through the various processing phases in order.

-- 
Aaron Crane
There's stuff above here

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