The only issue this doesn't address is nesting, but here's an idea that addresses that too. What if the nesting is based on the indentation and number of # characters? As in they need to match up in order to be paired. Then you can do things like this:

###
function foo(x,y)
  ###
    There seems to be an odd bug in the following
    very complex code that I have yet to discover
  ###
  while x < y
    # ...
  end
end
###

Here, you can easily nest the inner multiline comment inside the function because it's indented, while the outer multiline comment that hides the function definition entirely is flush left.

#####
bar(x,y) = foo(x+y,y)

###
  Another multi-line comment
  that has no real content
###
baz(x,y) = foo(x,x+y)
#####

In this case, you have a multiline comment nested inside of another by using a different number of hash marks, allowing you to easily comment out blocks of code that already have multiline comments in them, just by using more hash marks.

I'm imagining that you would mostly use ### for normal inline multiline comments and #### and so on for commenting out blocks of code, but of course, that's a convention that's up to people coding. This just facilitates it.

Note that unlike /* ... */ style multiline comments, you don't need to keep track of balanced pairs to handle nesting correctly: all you need to do to find the correct closing pair is match indentation and number of #. Much simpler.

multiline comments #69

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StefanKarpinskiopenedon Jun 21, 2011

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StefanKarpinski
openedon Jun 21, 2011