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Comment String Label and Macro Symbols

A few miscellaneous syntactic symbols that haven’t been previously covered are illustrated by this C++ example:

bash
 1: void Bass::play( int volume )
 2: const
 3: {
 4:     /* this line starts a multiline
 5:      * comment.  This line should get 'c' syntax */
 6:
 7:     char* a_multiline_string = "This line starts a multiline \
 8: string.  This line should get 'string' syntax.";
 9:
10:   note:
11:     {
12: #ifdef LOCK
13:         Lock acquire();
14: #endif // LOCK
15:         slap_pop();
16:         cout << "I played "
17:              << "a note\n";
18:     }
19: }

The lines to note in this example include:

  • Line 2 is assigned the func-decl-cont syntax.
  • Line 4 is assigned both defun-block-intro and comment-intro syntax. A syntactic element with comment-intro has no anchor point. It is always accompanied by another syntactic element which does have one.
  • Line 5 is assigned c syntax.
  • Line 6 which, even though it contains nothing but whitespace, is assigned defun-block-intro. Note that the appearance of the comment on lines 4 and 5 do not cause line 6 to be assigned statement syntax because comments are considered to be syntactic whitespace, which are ignored when analyzing code.
  • Line 8 is assigned string syntax.
  • Line 10 is assigned label syntax.
  • Line 11 is assigned block-open as well as statement syntax. A block-open syntactic element doesn’t have an anchor position, since it always appears with another syntactic element which does have one.
  • Lines 12 and 14 are assigned cpp-macro syntax in addition to the normal syntactic symbols (statement-block-intro and statement, respectively). Normally cpp-macro is configured to cancel out the normal syntactic context to make all preprocessor directives stick to the first column, but that’s easily changed if you want preprocessor directives to be indented like the rest of the code. Like comment-intro, a syntactic element with cpp-macro doesn’t contain an anchor position.
  • Line 17 is assigned stream-op syntax.