Haha well I never liked that idiom but I recently found out that
#ifdef was present in the first CPPs whereas #if was much later. So
that's why #ifdef notdef is seen a lot in old code. Anyway, personally
I use #if 0 and #if 1 quite a lot for debugging or questionable stuff.
For a while, I was quite into the idea of doing compile time options
like #define SOME_OPTION 1 and then using #if SOME_OPTION, as I felt
it was nicer than #ifdef SOME_OPTION. But I've changed my mind, as
this is pretty nonstandard usage and can be misleading. It's also not
really safer than #ifdef, since for some reason CPP accepts undefined
symbols and treats them as 0 in a #if statement. Go figure.
cheers, Nick

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 11:18 PM, Brantley Coile <brantleycoile at me.com> wrote:
> That’s a good convention. I use the convention that the permanent comments use the slash-splat form and the slash-slash from is used for temporary comment that will need attention later. They are TODO comments.
>
> I also use empty comments in the first column to note debugging stuff to remove laters. For example:
>
> void
> main(int argc, char **argv)
> {
>         ARGBEGIN {
>         default:
>                 usage();
>         } ARGEND
> /**/    print(“argc=%d argv=%p\n”, argc, argv);
> /**/    if (argc == 3)
> /**/            print(“that funny number again\n”);
>         if (argc == 0) {
>                 usestdin();
>         …
> }
>
> This lets the flow of the test logic clear yet is easy to find and remove the code later.
>
> I also use “#ifdef notdef” to comment out blocks of code. Have done since v7 days. Once I worked with a guy who saw the ifdefs and wondered what the function was that was def’ed out. He added -Dnotdef and all hell broke out!
>
>   Brantley
>
>> On Feb 8, 2017, at 11:55 PM, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:
>>
>> Well, personally I use // for almost all comments in C/C++.  I reserve /* */ for commenting out blocks of code.   Since, for some reason, /* */ doesn't nest, if I stick to this style life is good.
>>
>> Steve
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From:
>> "Steve Nickolas" <usotsuki at buric.co>
>>
>> To:
>> "The Eunuchs Hysterical Society" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
>> Cc:
>>
>> Sent:
>> Wed, 8 Feb 2017 21:47:49 -0500 (EST)
>> Subject:
>> Re: [TUHS] // comment in C++
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 9 Feb 2017, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>>
>> > On Wed, 8 Feb 2017, Steve Johnson wrote:
>> >
>> >> I remember some discussion about this.  In reality, a C comment really
>> >> requires you to type 8 characters, because putting anything adjacent to
>> >> the /* or */ looks terrible.  Many languages used single characters
>> >> (e.g., # for make).  The argument was "if you make comments easier to
>> >> type, you'll get more of them in the code"  (viz. the Unix kernel).  I'm
>> >> guessing Bjarne was aware of these discussions, although I don't
>> >> remember specifically that he was...
>> >
>> > My favourite C /* */ style is this:
>> >
>> > /*
>> > * foo
>> > * bar
>> > */
>>
>> This is the way I usually write my comments, too.
>>
>> > Is that what you meant? And recent C also accepts // as a comment, which
>> > I use like this:
>> >
>> > /*
>> > * This is where we do some neat stuff.
>> > */
>> > foo();
>> > weird_function();   // Yes, we need to call this here...
>> > bar();
>> >
>> > I'm quite taken by BIND, though, which accepts
>> >
>> > /* this */
>> > // this
>> > # and this.
>>
>> Unrealircd likewise accepts those 3 different types of comments.
>>
>> -uso.
>