C Reference Manual Reading Notes: 004 Comments

    Standard C supported two stylized comments:

      (1) Begin with the two characters /* and ends with the first subsequent occurence of the two characters */.

      (2) Begin with the characters // and extends up to(but does not include) the next line break.

 

      All comments may take any number of characters and are always treated as whitespace. And comments are not recognized inside string or character constants or within other comments.  The content s of comments are not examined by C implementation except to recognize (and pass over) multibyte characters and line breaks. Comments are removed by the compiler before preprocessing, so preprocessor commands inside comments will not be recognized, and line breaks inside comments do not terminate preprocessor commands. The following two #define commands have the same effect:

        #define ten (2*5)

        #define ten   /* ten

                               * one greater than nine

                               */  (2*5)

 

    Although some non-standard C implementation implement "nestable comments", please do not depend on it and used it.

 

 

    To cause the compiler to ignore large parts of C source, it is best to enclose the parts to be removed with the preprocessor commands

                 #if 0

                 ... ...

                 #endif

    rather than insert /* before and */ after the text. This avoids having to worry about /*-style comments in the enclosed source text.