preprocessor bug(?)

[Geoff Keating]

Neil Booth <neil@daikokuya.co.uk> writes:

> Zack Weinberg wrote:-
> 
> > On Thu, Nov 07, 2002 at 04:19:31PM -0800, Dale Johannesen wrote:
> > > One of our users just did this:
> > > 
> > > // comment, space character follows the backslash:\
> > > main() {
> > > }
> > > 
> > > gcc ignores the space character, which causes the comment to eat the 
> > > next line.
> > > That's wrong, isn't it?
> > 
> > No, that's an intentional feature.  From the manual:
> 
> We get so many complaints about this I'm starting to wonder if we should
> drop it.  Further, it complicates a stages 1 and 2 prescan, should we ever do
> that.

I would suggest that, as a policy, the meaning of a program be
affected only by things that users can see in an editor.

I would certainly like a warning for this, no matter how it's
interpreted.  I can just imagine someone spending hours trying to work
out why their complicated macro definition (or really neat comment)
causes syntax errors, and finally discovering that there was a stray
space... or that their intentional space got removed and they didn't
notice.

-- 
- Geoffrey Keating <geoffk@geoffk.org>