ok@edai.UUCP (01/19/84)
I like putting great big block comments in my C programs. I like putting examples of how to use various things in those comments. And of course well-written examples are commented. So the scheme I use is #if 0 /* COMMENT */ ... lots of text ... ... bits of C code, which can safely use /* comments */ ... lots of text ... #endif 0 /* COMMENT */ The two lines starting with a sharp are precisely what I type. Now I have used 6 different C compilers on 4 different kinds of machines, and all but the version 6+ PDP-11 C pre-processor were quite happy with it. In v6+ I had to say #ifdef COMMENT and be very very careful never to define COMMENT. As a careful programmer, I would like to use "lint". BUT lint evidently thinks 0 is true, and TRIES TO COMPILE MY COMMENTS!!!! I have put together an interface to lint that shoves all the files through the preprocessor (courtesy of "cc -E"), but it tends to tie up file space and from time to time I forget to use it. Can anyone tell me (a) why "lint" does something so very different from /lib/cpp with #if 0 (b) whether there is an easy way to tell it not to (c) whether System III/System V "lint" is this stupid (there must be *some* reason why people get S3 instead of 4.1).
gnu@sun.uucp (John Gilmore) (01/27/84)
I believe this is a cpp bug. Lint is a shell script -- try catting it. It invokes "cpp -C -Dlint" on your files and processes the output. The -C is to keep the comments (eg, /*NOTREACHED*/). However, some versions of cpp have a bug where a comment on an #if screws up. This never bothers the compiler since it asks that cpp strip comments anyway, but shows up for lint. There's probably a relatively trivial fix for this problem in cpp but I don't have it at hand. Any volunteers?