Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!uflorida!poe.ufnet.ufl.edu!seeger From: seeger@poe.ufnet.ufl.edu (F. L. Charles Seeger III) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: language commenting constructs Message-ID: <19925@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> Date: 15 Mar 89 22:57:41 GMT References: <1543@zen.UUCP> <12362@watdragon.waterloo.edu> Sender: news@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU Reply-To: seeger@iec.ufl.edu (F. L. Charles Seeger III) Organization: UF EE Dept Lines: 27 In article <12362@watdragon.waterloo.edu> gvcormack@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Gordon V. Cormack) writes: | |The lack of nested comments is an artifact of the conventional |way of building compilers using a finite state scanner and a |context-free parser. It is difficult (very difficult) to recognise |nested comments with a finite state scanner. Isn't it extremely trivial to augment a FSM scanner with a counter to keep track of nesting level? A heuristic nesting limit can be used to catch mismatched comment delimiters. Of course, whatever the limit, it should be settable via the command line. I don't think that I've ever wanted to nest more than two levels deep. Would that be so difficult with a "pure" FSM scanner? Then again, lack of nested comments isn't something that I get excited about. |With modern text editors, is there really any excuse for bracketed |comments? I think end-of-line is a perfect comment terminator. |Then nesting becomes a non-issue. Personally, I like bracketed comments for "commenting out" code (no flames please) and for long, multi-line comments for files and functions. Seems pretty easy to provide both without a significant performance hit. -- Charles Seeger 216 Larsen Hall +1 904 392 8935 Electrical Engineering University of Florida seeger@iec.ufl.edu Gainesville, FL 32611