[PATCH] backslash-space-newline in comments

[Zack Weinberg]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 07:51:34PM +0100, Neil Booth wrote:
> Jakub Jelinek wrote:-
> 
> > IMHO we should not handle
> > // \<space><newline>
> > as multi-line comment, unlike outside of comment where this is most
> > definitely a bug, I guess it is much more common that white space in comment
> > is added after \ so that it would not result in a multi-line comment than
> > that anybody wants a multi-line comment and just has left unintentionally
> > space at the end.
> > E.g. http://www.cs.utwente.nl/~tcm is one of the things which now trigger the
> > multi-line comment warnings.
> 
> Ugh, I guess it's a good idea, though I'm not 100% convinced.  I'd
> like to know what Zack thinks.  Why have single-line comments with
> \<space> at the end; what does the final \ provide?

>From Jakub's test case, things like this:

// \
//  \
//   >--------->
//  /
// /

with trailing spaces after each backslash, which the authors intended
to inhibit interpretation as \-newline.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for this sort of game.  /* */ comments
exist for a reason.

If we're going to do something, my suggestion is that we instead
suppress the \-newline in // warning, whether or not there's
intermediate whitespace, when the next line contains only a //
comment.  The \-newline then has no effect on the meaning of the
program.  I'm not sure how practical this is to implement.

zw