On Oct 25, 2005, at 8:11 PM, Joe Buck wrote:
// A poorly formatted comment \\
int x = 0;
int y = 1;
...
Howard,
Have you tested the sequence above with various compilers?
I only know of the results on gcc 4.x, MS, EDG-based, and Freescale
CodeWarrior.
I just
have. The behavior depends on whether there is whitespace after the
\\ or not. If there is none, then EDG-based compilers will comment
out the declaration of x. If there is whitespace, gcc 3.x comments
it out and the others don't.
Right, that's exactly the issue.
I personally like the fact that gcc's
behavior does not depend on invisible characters; on the other hand,
there's a good argument that this behavior is ordinarily not desirable
and should be warned about, except to continue strings.
I have difficulty believing that it is desirable for production code
to contain surprises like this.
Personally I'd fire a programmer that depended on the presence of
whitespace after a '\'. It is implementation defined behavior, and
invisible in the source at that (in most editors). I've seen code
broken both by gcc's behavior, and by other compiler's behavior by
depending on what happens when whitespace is included after a '\'.
And it is not my assertion that gcc's behavior is better or worse
than other compilers. Only that gcc's behavior is unique in the
industry (I actually haven't tried all other modern compilers) and
that uniqueness in this way is not an asset to gcc.
-Howard
