TITLE: preprocessor comment replacement (Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++.moderated, 18 Oct 99) KLEIN: Jack Klein >> The comment is replaced by exactly one white space character by the >> preprocessor. THOMAS: Biju Thomas >That is new information. This works on my compiler, but, can't find >anything specifying this in the standard. Why such a special rule for >comments? CLAMAGE: Steve Clamage Section 2.1 paragraph 3: "Each comment is replaced by one space character." The C standard contains the same requirement. Before the C standard, compilers varied in whether a comment was a lexical element. That is, given abc/* ... */def some compilers treated it as abcdef and some as abc def The C committee decided that you could not paste together parts of a token that way, and provided a more general mechanism for token-pasting. C++ follows C in that regard. [ The preprocessing token pasting is done with ## -adc ]