Re: Why don't C comments nest?

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 00:33:08 -0700, Al wrote:

Hi all,

(Apologies if this is in a FAQ somewhere, I couldn't find anything).

Almost every time I do any significant amount of coding in C or C++, I
end up wishing C-style comments would nest. It would make rapid
debugging much more convenient (vs. #if 0/#endif or editor macros).

Anyway, was this an explicit design decision, or some sort of historical
artifact? (e.g. too expensive to parse at the time).
I don't think that's the reason. I've never written a
preprocessor, but I think that to enable nested comments one would
just need a counting variable incremented for each /* and
decremented for each */, instead of a Boolean variable set and
reset. You might add a translation limit of "32767 nested
comments".

But they wouldn't be that useful. I agree with DTA.
--
Army1987 (Replace "NOSPAM" with "email")
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained
by stupidity." -- R. J. Hanlon (?)

.

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