On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 08:22:12PM -0400, Andrew Pinski wrote: > Why not get other compilers to change to what GCC does? Why does GCC > have to follow what other compilers do, maybe other compilers > would be in the best interest of following what GCC does.
The problem, I think, is that the behavior of both GCC *and* the other compilers does not serve the users. The reason is that there simply isn't any reason why a user would use a backslash to continue a C++ comment on purpose, and plenty of reason why she might do it by accident. There appear to be five relevant cases; the backslash-newline (or whitespace/backslash/newline) can be in 1) a C++ comment 2) a C comment 3) a string literal 4) a preprocessor directive 5) somewhere else. For cases 2 and 5, the behavior doesn't matter. For case 3, the continuation is unlikely to be accidental, and the user is, I think, less likely to leave a stray slash in case 4. But case 1 is the nasty one, as users think they can put anything in a comment. A backslash at the end is likely to be an accident, since just starting the next line with a // is easy enough. So, I think that a trailing backslash at the end of a C++ comment (followed or not by whitespace) should be warned about. I think Apple's customers would want this warning too, since many of them will also be interested in compiling for other systems, and there is a lot of gcc 3.x out there. Best to use warnings to get rid of the problematic code.
