backslash whitespace newline

[Joe Buck]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 07:41:11PM -0400, Howard Hinnant wrote:
> I'm not convinced that "extension" is a proper term for this  
> behavior.  It is more like an incompatibility with the rest of the  
> world's compilers.  The reason for change is to conform to a de-facto  
> standard, and thus ease the migration of future gcc customers to our  
> compiler.
> 
> These hypothetical customers coming from MS, EDG-based, or  
> CodeWarrior compilers might have code that looks like:
> 
> // A poorly formatted comment \\
> int x = 0;
> int y = 1;
> ...

Howard,

Have you tested the sequence above with various compilers?  I just
have.  The behavior depends on whether there is whitespace after the
\\ or not.  If there is none, then EDG-based compilers will comment
out the declaration of x.  If there is whitespace, gcc 3.x comments
it out and the others don't.  I personally like the fact that gcc's
behavior does not depend on invisible characters; on the other hand,
there's a good argument that this behavior is ordinarily not desirable
and should be warned about, except to continue strings.

I have difficulty believing that it is desirable for production code
to contain surprises like this.