Frank Heckenbach wrote:
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Does Mac Pascal allow real nested comments, i.e. `{ ... { ... } ... }'? (Then it might be the first compiler I hear of that does so, apart from GPC. I had even considered dropping that option, OTOH, it's quite useful for embedding TeX etc. in comments.)
And `--nested-comments --no-mixed-comments' would also mean comments such as `{ ... { ... (* ... } ... }'. Is it so?
I am confused as to what you actually have. I consider that there are two forms of comment delimiters, (* comment *) and { comment }. Let's refer to them as star and brace comments. The standard mandated thing is that a star delimiter and a brace delimiter are always interchangeable individually. The other attitude is that the comments are separate beasts, so that (* commment { junk } more *) is a single star comment which happens to include brace characters (and the inverse). Call this nested comments. I don't believe that any system that counts comment opening symbols so as to allow full comment nesting is useful or desireable.
If we are agreed on that then the only thing to discuss is whether, having selected the nested/non-nested formats, the appearance of an open-comment marker in a comment should trigger a warning. It is certainly not an error. I consider the warning should always appear, but others may differ. I would call this warn on possible unclosed comments.