[Gllug] Interesting article on the MS monopoly

[Tethys]

Nix writes:

>Like in er, C?
>
>/* Try using a visible slash star in here. */
>
>/* Plus there are other hidden *tricks*??/
>/ Is this in the comment? /* No, it wasn't. */

No, not like in C. BTW, using trigraphs to make obfuscated code is
considered cheating -- it's too easy :-)

But no, in C, the only invalid characters are the end of comment markers.
The same isn't true in XML. For example, the following is (to me) a fairly
natural way (and immediately obvious to the eye when scanned) to do a block
comment in XML:

	<!-- This is a comment.
	---- So should this be.
	---- And this...
	-->

However, the "--" at the start of the second line is invalid within a
comment, despite requiring a trailing ">" to make it an end of comment
marker. This has bitten me elsewhere, for example when commenting out
text that includes a double dash to simulate an em dash in ASCII -- like
the one I've just used.

XML could also *really* use a #if 0/#endif equivalent for block commenting
large volumes of text, regardless of whether they contain other XML comments.

The failings of XML in this regard have evolved into a tradition of not
using any markers to indicate that a line is part of a block comment. Try
looking at a tomcat config file[1] and working out which lines are comment
and which are not (without having to parse the file by eye).

Tet

[1] conf/server.xml, for example... bleurgh!
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