[RFC] Nestable comments in Algol 68

WB Kloke wb@pkeus.de
Tue May 20 20:27:36 GMT 2025


Sorry for the defect messages:
Here comes the corrected one:
I support the introduction of nested comments by braces, as in a68RS.
The bold version via NOTE ... ETON is not worth to be implemented or even
be defined, though. It is just an appeasement to a bad practise.

Let us look at the CO-style comment: if it happens that the string CO is
contained in a string in a commented-out section of a program, any 
lexer-parser combi will fail.

Example:

CO
  PROC d = (LIST l)INT:
    If l IS NIL THEN error("CO hd nil") SKIP ELSE h OF l FI;
CO

(from primes.a68, of course, the original string did not contain CO)

Comments should be handled strictly at lexical level. 
Therefore I would like some sort of line oriented comment, like C++'s //.



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