Why are nested comments forbidden in C++, Java inspite of the fact that nested comments are useful, neat, and elegant and can be used to comment out statements that have comments?
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Why are nested comments forbidden in C++, Java inspite of the fact that nested comments are useful, neat, and elegant and can be used to comment out statements that have comments?
C and C++ do it for ease of parsing. This way, when they hit a comment start of /*, the parser can trivially scan to the end. Otherwise, it would have to set up and maintain a stack, and then report errors if the comment tokens are unmatched.
As to why Java does it, the answer is simple – Java’s syntax was designed to emulate C and C++. If nested comments were allowed, it might trip up some C programmers, and many angry blog posts would be written!