Multiline comments. WAS:Re: Recording what we decided *not* to do, and why

Glenn Linderman said:
> Regarding obviosity, # end-of-line comments already exist and the
> eyeball has
> become trained to consider them as comments... for many years of shell,
> make,
> hosts file, etc. usage, long before Perl, the eyeball has learned to
> pick out
> # to mean beginning of comment.  #< (or the like, any bracket character,
> or,
> with deference to the multitudes of C and Pascal programmers, even the
> "*"
> character, as in "#*...*#") is a simple extension to #, and, by use of a
> bracket character (or *), implies there will be an end.
>

I like this quite a lot. Heck, even a C programmer could like #* ... *# !

I wonder though about backwards compatability. Let me clarify what you
propose with some examples:

    code here; #your typical comment here
    some code; #*still a single line of comment, but how does parser know?
    more code;
    code #*inline comment here*# rest of code;
    #*
        block comment here
    *#
    code again;

--Michael