Picket fence comments

Here's a stupid trick for C++ or C99 programmers. Make your comments look like a picket fence:

// Here's the first line of my comment \\
\\ Here's the second line              //
// You can go on and on like this      \\
\\ but you have to be careful about    //
// how you end the comment, or the     \\
\\ next line might be commented out    //

Why does this work? You can't use \\ as a single line comment, can you?

Hint; this doesn't work:

// This is a comment
\\ But this isn't

Why can't you do this in C89? Because // comments weren't supported until the 1999 revision of the ISO C spec although a number of compilers "embraced and extended" the standard (I'm looking at you Microsoft and GNU).

Why would you do this? I guess you could use it to help document your Obfuscated C Code Contest entry. But in the end this is just another example of something you can do in C but shouldn't.