Duncan Murdoch wrote: > On 2/11/2009 1:21 PM, Stavros Macrakis wrote: >> 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. > > I agree about that. I think the lack of multiline comments comes from > design considerations rather than implementation ones. They're just > not needed, and having two types of comments would lead to weird > interactions, e.g. is the block comment closed in the lines below? > > /* > # */
it's still a simple design decision which, once made, can be implemented coherently. vQ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
