From: Zsban Ambrus <ambrus@...>
Date: 2005-01-14T18:24:54+09:00
Subject: Re: why dosn't ruby support  // to comment?

On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 04:11:31PM +0900, Alexey Verkhovsky wrote:
> Because // is an empty regular expression.

Not only that, but also a division by a regular expression.

That might sound silly, but in the pike programming language, you can split
strings with the / operator.  Thus, someone might want to do this in ruby:

	class String; alias_method :/, :split; end; 
	w1, w2 = "foo:bar"//:/; puts w2;

And to carry it even further, one can consider these examples too:

A division of a character constant:

	puts ?//5; 

Or a division of a symbol:

	class Symbol; def /(x); x.send(self, 2); end; end;
	puts ://5;

But of course these last two cases could still be exceptions from the
comment syntax, just like # now is not a comment in single quotes either.

(But note that the // comment could be normal syntax in C too before it was
accepted by C99, for example this expression

	9//*foo*/2

has different meaning in traditional C and C99.)

ambrus