On Montag, 6. Juni 2011, 19:08, Albert Y. C. Lai wrote:
Bearing in mind that the characters that have been used to begin end of line comments include *, /, ;, !, #, %, and $, it's not clear that there's anything _that_ regrettable about "-- ".
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: 'An ordinary comment begins with a sequence of two or more consecutive dashes (e.g. --) and extends to the following newline. The sequence of dashes must not form part of a legal lexeme. For example, “-->” or “|--” do not begin a comment, because both of these are legal lexemes; however “-- foo” does start a comment.' A sequence of two or more dashes does not begin an end-of-line-comment if and only if it is part of a lexeme containing only symbols and at least one non-dash symbol. It might be a good idea to include whitespace in the comment delimiter: end-of-line-comment is begun by whitespace--{-}whitespace.