On Tue, 15 Nov 2011, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس   سماوي حامد wrote:

> On Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:38:42 -0700, Idris Samawi Hamid ادريس  سماوي حامد 
> <ishamid@colostate.edu> wrote:
>
>> OTOH, why not just use
>> bla bla \message{Here is a note to myself.} bla bla
>
> Just curious: Is there anything that \message is missing for what u want? I 
> tried both inline and multiline combos and they all work like a charm:

Untested, but I am pretty sure

\message{\iffalse}

will fail. Basically, everything inside \message (or the \hide macro by 
Wolfgang) needs to be processed by TeX, so strictly speaking it is not 
equivalent to a comment.

See the TeX FAQ http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=conditional 
for more details.

The most robust solution is to use buffers, but that will not work if the 
buffer is part of a macro argument.

The luatex solution (which is again not perfect) that I posted removes 
everything inside the comment before it is seeen by TeX.

Aditya