Re: recursive comments (Was: Techniques for writing an interpreter)

On 20 Mar 1998 Stefan Monnier <monnier@tequila.cs.yale.edu> wrote:
>What languages allow recursive comments ?


The Oberon language does. The following is a quotation from
http://www-vs.informatik.uni-ulm.de/projekte/Oberon-2.Report/


    6. Comments may be inserted between any two symbols in a program. They are
    arbitrary character sequences opened by the bracket (* and closed by *).
    Comments may be nested. They do not affect the meaning of a program.
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^


>What languages enforce a "lexing" of the content of comments (so that an
>end-comment inside a string inside a comment is ignored) ?


It is not clear if this implies that comments should be able to contain end
of comment delimiters in a string or not. I believe that most compiler
implementors would exclude the closing comment delimiter from the arbitrary
character sequence if for no other reason than expediency.


Mark


--
Mark K. Gardner (mkgardne@cs.uiuc.edu)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Real-Time Systems Laboratory
--

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