Re: RFC: multiline comments

Glenn Linderman said:
> And while the existing q.() operators are typically used to surround
> fairly short blocks of text, with controlled content, the desire to
> comment out blocks of existing code with a multi-line comment facility
> has different goals, that are hard to meet with a single character
> delimiter, especially a paired one that results in scanning of the
> internal content for consistent usage of the delimiter.

Yes! this exactly the problem that I think *any* function-based proposal
will suffer, namely: function arguments have single-character delimiters,
and that single-character must not appear unescaped within the argument
itself.

Therefore the idea of using a comment function fails in the very important
goal of making it easy to comment large chunks of arbitrary perl code.

Unless anyone can prove otherwise I would say we should consider that a dead
issue.


> A multi-character delimiter seems required to me to make it easy to
> identify a delimiter which can be safely used.  One very Perl-ish
> technique for multi-character delimiters is

> <<END_OF_TEXT
>
> stuff
>
>
> END_OF_TEXT
>
> Together with the very Perl-ish technique for comments (the '#'
> character) this leads very obviously to:
>
> #<<END_OF_TEXT
>
> comment stuff
>
> END_OF_TEXT
>

I like this a lot. Any idea how this could work inline? or would you prefer
not to have fully inline comments?

--Michael