Re: Is there a way to do large block of source code comments

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

<Stefan.Lucks@uni-weimar.de> wrote in message 
news:alpine.DEB.2.11.1409032257530.28165@debian...
On Wed, 3 Sep 2014, Pascal Obry wrote:

>> Parsing a comment section???? Strange idea, I doubt this is reasonable.
>
>Hey, what do you think your Ada compiler is actually doing now? After
>"--", it searches for the line end. This *is* parsing.

Well, I'd call it lexing (it's part of the tokenizer, not the parser). But 
of course the line between lexing and parsing is rather arbitrary and 
typically depends on the implementation.

For Ada, I would say that the contents of Section 2 are lexing, and 
everything else is parsing. That was literally true in early versions of 
Janus/Ada, including pragmas [they really were dealt with lexically]). For 
Ada 95 and later, pragmas have gotten too complex and don't belong in 
Section 2, but everything else there is lexical.

Getting back to the topic, since comments are in Section 2, they are clearly 
lexical and not parsed. QED. :-) So talking about "parsing" them is 
definitely nonsense. But since the rule in question would be purely lexical, 
it certainly could have made sense.

                                           Randy.