🚀 go-pugleaf

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