On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:32 PM, Greg Snow <[email protected]> wrote:
> ...The c-style of /* */ allows both types and you can comment out part of a
> line, but it is not simple to match and has its own restrictions. Friedl in
> his regular expressions book takes 10 pages to develop a pattern to match
> these (and the final pattern is almost 2 full lines of text in the book).
> And this is without allowing nesting....
Though there is a real debate about the value of multiline, possibly
nested, comments, the regular expression argument is a red herring.
Lexical analysis of multiline comments is a solved problem (and not a
particularly difficult one!), and matters only to language and editor
implementors. Emacs handles them with no problem.
-s
PS And to give credit where credit is due (important on this mailing
list), the /* */ syntax was defined by PL/I; C simply implemented an
existing convention and popularized it. :-)
______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
