[Bug gas/12390] New: binutils as accepts single '/' as if it were a comment

[nlewycky at google dot com]

http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12390

           Summary: binutils as accepts single '/' as if it were a comment
           Product: binutils
           Version: unspecified
            Status: NEW
          Severity: minor
          Priority: P2
         Component: gas
        AssignedTo: address@hidden
        ReportedBy: address@hidden


I found some code in the wild (NSPR from Mozilla) which is using / as a comment
block, ala.:

  / -*- Mode: C++; tab-width: 4; indent-tabs-mode: nil; c-basic-offset: 2 -*-
  / 
  / ***** BEGIN LICENSE BLOCK *****
  / Version: MPL 1.1/GPL 2.0/LGPL 2.1
  /

which isn't a documented way of writing a comment. Now, the documentation does
say "On some machines there are two different line comment characters. One
character only begins a comment if it is the first non-whitespace character on
a line, while the other always begins a comment." but never specifies whether /
is such a character.

I'm going to propose that gas document the support of '//' style comments
(along-side /* and */) and change code to reject bare '/'. On the other side,
I'm going to ask the Mozilla folks to change their code from '/' to '//' for
these comments.

Quick reference, the documentation I refer to is
http://sourceware.org/binutils/docs-2.21/as/Comments.html#Comments

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