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Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 14:28:07 -0400
From: Peter Chapin <PChapin@vtc.vsc.edu>
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Subject: Re: Is there a way to do large block of source code comments
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Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:188838
Date: 2014-09-03T14:28:07-04:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

On 2014-09-03 13:48, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> It is standard practice in original SPARK, Java, and eLisp
> to parse "comment sections". Also, languages such as Python
> and Ruby parse commenting strings, similar to format strings.
> 
> They know the value of giving comments language status.

In SPARK 2005 only special comments starting with --# where processed by
the SPARK tools and they had a very tightly controlled syntax.
Completely general comments starting with -- were still ignored.

The tricky part about parsing comments is that comments are intended to
be completely general and could contain arbitrary "line noise" for all
the compiler knows. Looking for too much structure in a general comment
could be problematic.

That said it doesn't seem impossibly difficult or awkward to scan
comments for sequences like "*/" or "*)" etc. I'm not sure I'd call that
"parsing" exactly but that's perhaps just a matter of definition.

Peter