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Asked: 2026-06-14T03:44:22+00:00

my question comes from the following 2 simple line of C++ code: cout<</*; cout<<*/;

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my question comes from the following 2 simple line of C++ code:

cout<<"/*";
cout<<"*/";

In my opinion, the comment delimiters /* */ eat the characters "; and cout<<" which is inside of them. So the two lines must be equal to:

cout<<"";

Surprisingly, when I compile and test the code, the program prints:

/**/

It is likely the program recognize comment delimiter as normal characters. How could that be? The code was compiled in gcc-c++-4.7.2.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    From the C FAQ.

    The character sequences /* and */ are not special within double-quoted
    strings, and do not therefore introduce comments, because a program
    (particularly one which is generating C code as output) might want to
    print them. (It is hard to imagine why anyone would want or need to
    place a comment inside a quoted string. It is easy to imagine a
    program needing to print “/*”.)

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