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From: Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Programming exercise/challenge
Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2020 23:03:06 -0800
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Richard Damon <Richard@Damon-Family.org> writes:

> On 12/7/20 9:31 AM, Bart wrote:
>
>> On 07/12/2020 14:18, Bart wrote:
>>
>>> (Except I don't personally agree with splitting tokens across lines,
>>> so will not implement it.  Anyone who splits "//" across two, or
>>> possibly N lines, should be fired.
>>>
>>> It's not even a feature that would allow arbitrary insertion of
>>> \<newline> anywhere (eg. inside string literals, or just before an
>>> existing \<newline>) so I can't see the point.
>>
>> I keep forgetting that \ would be followed by <newline>, so maybe it
>> /is/ possible to allow it everywhere, even put every character of a
>> source file on its own line.
>>
>> I still think it is not necessary to allow tokens to be split across lines.
>>
>> Actually it's funny that C allows so much freedom with \ given that,
>> unlike many languages, C hardly ever needs to use \ to continue code
>> into a following line.  (I think only for macro bodies;  the //abc\ case
>> is a misfeature.)
>
> I think it came about as C was (is?) a common 'output' language for many
> code generators, and coupled with fixed 80 column screens, having a
> fixed output width of the code was important, so being able to just
> split the code anywhere was useful.

I expect it came about in the very early days of C when the C
preprocessor was a completely separate program and knew nothing
of C syntax, in which case having it be completely independent
of the language syntax is about the only thing that makes sense.