Comments aren't always comments??

[dalecosp]

Just spent 45 minutes debugging a script...
I guess I should have thought about this,
but, I'm a copious typist when it comes
to comments. This comment <!> produced
a parse error in php4:

Comment blah blah <<??seperated by colon??>>

Yeah, it was all on one line. I guess I
should have thought sooner about the
parser seeing itself called on and off there. But I never read anything about this
in my books or the manual, or on any dev
sites. I thought it was weird, or at least
worth mentioning. Would something like this
happen in other "languages" --- type reserved characters within comments and
produce errors?

KDK

[Anon]

Should <<??seperated by colon??>> be parsed PHP code or only comment ??? If it has to be parsed, the ?? will produce an error... use only one.

[dalecosp]

Well, it was within a script section,
but should have been, IMO, marked off
limit by the # character (I run a -BSD
so I'm used to the Perl-type comment
marker rather than // as most PHP users
seem to prefer).

I thought that since it was all on the
same line and that line started with a

that there was no way the parser would

even be looking at it....once I removed
the <<'s then the parse error disappeared.
This surprised me, so I thought I'd post
and see if I should have been surprised
or not. I've been flat on my rear all
week with something 'kin to pneumonia, so
I apologize if I'm wasting bandwidth. It's
been just me and the laptop---

Thanks, KDK