Re: New-line fight: Comment -vs- the end of source file
James Kanze wrote:
Kaba wrote:
ISO 14882 international C++ standard says:
2.1/2: ... If a source file that is not empty does not end
in a new-line character, or ends in a new-line character
immediately preceded by backslash, the behaviour is
undefined.
I've always been irritated by the requirement that a file must
end in a new-line. It just comes to me automatically to leave
the last row without an new-line.
What kind of program editor do you use? I can't imagine a
program editor not ending a file it writes with a new line.
(For whatever historical reasons, we view programs as a sequence
of lines, e.g. the error messages from the compiler give a line
number. Given this, it would seem logical that any program
editor be line based, or at least give the impression of being
so when editing code.)
[snip]
In practice, I cannot see a system where it is possible to
generate a text file which doesn't end in a newline (it's not
possible on most systems---Windows and Unix are exceptions in
this regard), where it is not reasonably easy to read the
trailing data and detect the error. So in practice, I would
expect an error message from the compiler. I would still favor
keeping the requirement, however, since copying such files to
another system could easily result in the last line missing.
[snip]
We seem to come from different worlds, James.... all the Visual Studio
editors, I've used allow me to not put an empty line at the bottom and
so does e.g. notepad. Why on earth would a text-editor submit a blank
line in the end of a random text? Unless the editor was made especially
for editing of c/C++ files I can't see a reason (but there are reasons
not to).
/Peter
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