On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:32 PM, Greg Snow <greg.s...@imail.org> wrote:
> ...The c-style of /* */ allows both types and you can comment out part of a
> line, but it is not simple to match and has its own restrictions. Friedl in
> his regular expressions book takes 10 pages to develop a pattern to match
> these (and the final pattern is almost 2 full lines of text in the book).
> And this is without allowing nesting....
Though there is a real debate about the value of multiline, possibly
nested, comments, the regular expression argument is a red herring.
Lexical analysis of multiline comments is a solved problem (and not a
particularly difficult one!), and matters only to language and editor
implementors. Emacs handles them with no problem.
-s
PS And to give credit where credit is due (important on this mailing
list), the /* */ syntax was defined by PL/I; C simply implemented an
existing convention and popularized it. :-)
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