Ignore, at the input-driver stage, comment lines beginning with ‘C’, ‘c’, or ‘*’.
Interpretation: In the usual mode of operation, the FORTRAN-77 input driver makes a heroic attempt to mix the original single-line column-1 commenting style with the FWEB style (‘/*...*/’ and ‘//’). It converts single-line comments to the ‘/*...*/’ style and passes them along to the innards of the processors.
Problems sometimes arise when converting an existing FORTRAN code to FWEB. Such codes may have very large blocks of code or documentation commented out with a ‘C’ in column 1. Special TeX characters in those comments can cause problems for FWEAVE; sometimes FTANGLE gets confused as well. The ‘-nC’ option short-circuits these problems by simply throwing all such lines away at the input driver stage.
This option is not a recommended long-term solution. Instead, consider the following:
- In FWEB, blocks of code should be commented out with the preprocessor commands
@#if 0...@#endif; see Temporary comments.- Textual comments for documentation should be converted to the standard FWEB commenting style.
- If one has a block of code prefaced by an extremely long comment, replace that by a named module and put the comment into the TeX part of that section.