Backlslashes in the IDE

[tstanley]

Here's a little something that everyone should watch out for.  If you put a backslash at the end of a C++ style comment the compiler will consider the next line as part of the comment and will ignore it.  I believe this is perfectly valid behavior, but CVI's syntax highlighting doesn't show that line as being part of the comment so this can lead to some non-obvious bugs where lines of code appear to be "skipped over" in the debugger.

Here's a screenshot of some sample code in CVI.  Note that in this example the line b = 2 will not be compiled:

Here's the same code copied into Notepad++ with its syntax highlighting:

[D-Cubed]

Hi tstanley,

As you mentioned in the first part of your comment, this is expected behavior.  If you put a line continuation symbol \ at the end of a line, it effectively merges the two lines together. If you have a // comment block in the first line, that effectively causes the entire second line to also be part of the comment.  If you add any character after the \ symbol, it will no longer act as a line continuation symbol, and you won't have this problem.

Alternatively, you can use the /*Comment\ */ comment structure, and this error will not occur.

I hope this clears things up.

Warm Regards,

[tstanley]

I wouldn't normally end a comment on a backslash like that, but I did it by accident - with the backslash key next to the ENTER key it's all too easy to fat-finger it.  Since CVI's syntax highlighter doesn't show the next line as a comment in this case it left me with a real head-scratcher until I realized what was going on.  A search of the project revealed one other place where that had happened, though luckily the resulting bug was minor.  It's just something to watch out for.

[D-Cubed]

Hi tstanley,

Thank you for your feedback!  I have filed this as a syntax highlighting bug in our system.  The syntax highlighting feature should include this.

Warm Regards,

[valib]

I just encountered this bug with CVI 2017 version 17.0.0 (295)

I wonder if this bug is still present in later versions...

Very annoying bug!

[RobertoBozzolo]

I just want to highlight that if you enable "Comment"  warning in the build options you will be notified in case a backslash exists in a c++-style comment line