[comp.std.c] Q-> can you nest comments in var names?

rfink@eng.umd.edu (Russell A. Fink) (10/11/90)

By rules of Kernighan and Ritchie, or standard adaptations of the
language, can I nest comments within variable names?
int number;
.
.
.
printf ("Value is %d", num/* this is obnoxious */ber);

Is that obnoxious comment permitted, or is it syntactically wrong?
Thanks in advance for response.





--
   //=====   //=====   Russ Fink  ===============
  //        //____     rfink@eng.umd.edu        
 //        //          University of Maryland
//=====   //=====      College Park  ============

karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) (10/11/90)

In article <1990Oct10.211829.3168@eng.umd.edu> rfink@eng.umd.edu (Russell A. Fink) writes:
>By rules of Kernighan and Ritchie, or standard adaptations of the
>language, can I nest comments within variable names?
>	printf ("Value is %d", num/* this is obnoxious */ber);

It's illegal (because comments are whitespace) in ANSI C.  In Classic C it's
illegal according to the book, but legal by common practice, so the practical
answer is that it's implementation-dependent.

Karl W. Z. Heuer (karl@ima.isc.com or harvard!ima!karl), The Walking Lint

ccplumb@spurge.uwaterloo.ca (Colin Plumb) (10/11/90)

In article <1990Oct10.211829.3168@eng.umd.edu> rfink@eng.umd.edu (Russell A. Fink) writes:

> By rules of Kernighan and Ritchie, or standard adaptations of the
> language, can I nest comments within variable names?

> int number;
> printf ("Value is %d", num/* this is obnoxious */ber);

> Is that obnoxious comment permitted, or is it syntactically wrong?

There are tricks I can play with the preprocessor to make it compile
(#define num sizeof, for example), but by ANSI C rules, this must
preprocess to
printf("Value is %d", num ber);

The old Reiser cpp did crunch comments down to nothing, concatenating
tokens, and this was frequently used in wierd ways, e.g.
#define ListOf(type) ListOf/**/type
but this behaviour, while very common on Unix compilers, has always
been non-portable.
-- 
	-Colin

gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (10/11/90)

In article <1990Oct10.211829.3168@eng.umd.edu> rfink@eng.umd.edu (Russell A. Fink) writes:
>... can I nest comments within variable names?
>printf ("Value is %d", num/* this is obnoxious */ber);

That's not right -- a comment is replaced with in effect a single space.