URL in C (2011)

92•birdculture•2mo ago

Comments

gblargg•2mo ago

I do this to embed shell commands at the beginning of short one-file C/C++ programs to execute when hitting an F key in my text editor. I usually put very basic compile-and-run commands. It's wrapped in #if and #endif which are comments in many shells. I end the commands with exit so it doesn't try to execute the code as commands.

writebetterc•2mo ago

This is why you should only use /* */ as your comment style.

danhau•2mo ago

How is this related to the article?

wkjagt•2mo ago

Solve the puzzle and you'll know :-)

dxroshan•2mo ago

It's a puzzle. Nobody is going to put a URL amid your code. There is no harm in using // for comments.

writebetterc•2mo ago

It's a joke

dxroshan•2mo ago

My bad, I thought you are serious.

p0w3n3d•2mo ago

Quite a time ago, my colleague accidentally committed a Youtube url to our Java codebase (middle-click accidental paste, no code review at that time). We had some laughing moments when we discovered it, as it was compelling evidence that he was watching videos during work, and even we knew what he was watching at that time.

raverbashing•2mo ago

Of all the (ahem, not as many as hoped) things C++ got right, // comments are one of the best ones

And I'm glad it now is part of C as well

dhosek•2mo ago

I remember working on some code back in ’99 when the other dev on the project used // comments in C code which, it turned out, were supported by the C compiler we were using, but which broke the embedded SQL preprocessor.

anonnon•2mo ago

Clearly, the "http:" is parsed as a label (for goto), and the subsequent "//", as a C++ or C99 comment. This shouldn't give you more than a moment's pause if you know C.

pwdisswordfishy•2mo ago

Or if you use a syntax highlighter.

anonnon•2mo ago

Yes, I don't know why people are downvoting me. Have these people never seen C code using goto-based error handling?

NackerHughes•2mo ago

I wouldn't be surprised if a fair majority of them have been taught to see goto as nothing but a vestige of the 70s which should never be used under any circumstances except as a meme or to deliberately obfuscate code.

I have recently become quite fond of goto-based error handling and find it a lot cleaner and more readable than the if-else-mountains you otherwise end up with. I just make sure to leave a comment with a link to xkcd.com/292 so anyone else reading it knows I'm aware of what I'm doing. Now with this URL trick I can do both in one line. :)

elcapitan•2mo ago

And the corresponding `goto http` is the chef's kiss :D love it

dhosek•2mo ago

I mean, I’ve not written C code in decades¹ and this didn’t cause a second’s pause.

⸻

1. Long enough ago that the only practical way to get syntax highlighting was to run a separate program on the source code to generate a TeX document.

tromp•2mo ago

You can only have one URL for each scheme though, else your compiler will report something like

error: redefinition of label 'https'

rplnt•2mo ago

This puzzle would become extra trivial with syntax highlighting.

eps•2mo ago

Nice.

Another neat comment-based construct is the good old:

  //*
     foo
  /*/
     bar
  //*/

It yields 'foo' as is, and 'bar' if the first slash is removed.

pwdisswordfishy•2mo ago

It's not as needed in C given that you can use #if 1

It is handy in C derivatives, though.

askl•2mo ago

At least when using -Wall the compiler will give you the warning

  <source>:5:5: warning: label 'https' defined but not used [-Wunused-label]

as a hint.

rts_cts•2mo ago

That's exactly how we found an accidental copy/paste of an internal URL in our source code.

1vuio0pswjnm7•2mo ago

Wouldn't there be a warning about an unused goto label

alilikestech•2mo ago

This is very neat.

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