Lisp-style comments

[Henry Spencer]

In article <14292 at bfmny0.UUCP> tneff at bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
>>... It's convenient if you have it but if you're writing
>>C code that needs to be widely portable you dare not use this feature.
>
>If there were a portable public-domain convert program that could
>transform //commented C into /* commented */ C, you could hand that out
>along with any //code you distributed, and so be sure that everyone
>could build your product...

This sort of solution often gets advocated in such cases.  It doesn't
work too well in practice, unfortunately.  What happens when you get an
update in the form of a diff script?  What happens if the user doesn't
have the disk space to hold both original and commentized versions?
Which version do you make changes to (hint:  there is no one right answer)?
It's not worth the trouble for such a minor notational point.
-- 
Mars in 1980s:  USSR, 2 tries, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
2 failures; USA, 0 tries.      | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu