Re: [gentoo-user] comments on portage.keywords

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday 16 September 2009 04:14:59 Crístian Viana wrote:
> but in that case the "#" character is inside a string, so it wuldn't be
> considered a comment. I was thinking like "//" in Java: it can be anywhere
> in the line, but if it's inside a string it's not considered a comment
> marker.
> 
> but thanks again for the information :)

To deal with a hash anywhere, you need a complex language parser and probably 
a full blown tokenizer like compilers have to implement.

This is decidedly non-trivial.

Java is a freeform language, the location of line breaks does not really 
matter. Config files are very different beasts, they are very much line 
oriented - one setting per line. Think like grep, it deals with a line at a 
time.

So the easiest implementation by far is the comment marker must be the first 
non-whitespace character, other wise it isn't a comment. That one step can 
make most of your config file bugs never happen, just like that.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com