On Monday 06 June 2011, 19:51:44, Albert Y. C. Lai wrote: > On 11-06-06 01:34 PM, Daniel Fischer wrote: > > On Montag, 6. Juni 2011, 19:08, Albert Y. C. Lai wrote: > >> Recall that the problem is not with isolated characters, but whole > >> strings. > >> > >> "-- a" is a comment, "--a" is a comment, but "---a" is not. > > > > It is. Report, section 2.3: > Sorry. Then "--|" is not a comment. In C++, "//|" is a comment (compare > with Haskell's "--|"!).
True. But then, to my knowledge, C++ has a fixed small set of operators, so the problem of a comment delimiter possibly being part of a different lexeme doesn't arise there. There is, however, a somewhat similar problem in C and C++: z = *x/*y; // oops */ Back to Haskell: I agree, the choice of the comment delimiter was not the best in light of the possibility to define operators containing it as a substring. But changing it to have "--|" start a comment too might break too much code (and eliminating "--" as a comment starter would certainly break far too much code). _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe