Re: multiple line comments

[Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu>]

<--- On Mar 28, Taco Hoekwater wrote --->

>
>
> andrea valle wrote:
>> Dear all,
>> It's a bit tiring to start many lines always  with %.
>> Is it possibile to have multiple line comments like in C
>>
>> \*
>> comments here
>> *\
>
> \iffalse
>  comments here
> \fi

Be careful with this. From the UK tex FAQ

The simple \newcommand{\gobble}[1]{} and \iffalse ... \fi aren't 
really satisfactory (as a general solution) for comments, since the 
matter being skipped is nevertheless scanned by TeX, not always as you 
would expect. The scanning imposes restrictions on what you're allowed 
to skip; this may not be a problem in today's job, but could return to 
bite you tomorrow. For an example of surprises that may come to bite 
you, consider the following example (derived from real user 
experience):

\iffalse % ignoring this bit
consider what happens if we
use \verb|\iftrue| -- a surprise
\fi

The \iftrue is spotted by TeX as it scans, ignoring the \verb command; 
so the \iffalse isn't terminated by the following \fi. Also, \gobble 
is pretty inefficient at consuming anything non-trivial, since all the 
matter to be skipped is copied to the argument stack before being 
ignored.


Aditya