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The separators are spaces, tabs, end-of-lines, and comments, and they can appear anywhere in an Irie Pascal program without altering its meaning, except that:

• At least one separator must appear between consecutive identifiers, reserved words, integers or real numbers.
• Separators can not occur inside any other language element (symbol).

      {      or       (*

and

      }      or       *)

As an extension to Standard Pascal, Irie Pascal also recognizes comments beginning with // (in which case the // and any text that follows on the same line is ignored). So for example the line below is a comment.

   //rest of the text on the line

By default comments can not be nested (i.e. by default comments can not contain other comments). So comments like

   (* outer (* inner comment *) comment *)

will be terminated at the first close comment marker, like below

   (* outer (* inner comment *)

the last part

    comment *)

will not be treated as part of the comment and will cause a syntax error.

There is a compiler option that causes the compiler to support nested comments. When this compiler option is enabled the compiler recognizes the end of comments only when the number of close comment markers matches the number of open comment markers. So the example comment above will terminate only after the second *).

Both open comment markers (* and { are considered to be equivalent, and both close comment markers *) and } are considered to be equivalent. So when nested comments are not enabled, the compiler will not recognize comments like the one below:

   (* outer { inner comment } comment *)

Support for nested comments is disabled by default since in Standard Pascal comments do not nest.

Compiler directives are special kinds of comments, and are instructions to the compiler. See compiler directives for more information,