multiline comments

[Edward Elliott]

At the risk of flogging a dead horse, I'm wondering why Python doesn't have 
any multiline comments.  One can abuse triple-quotes for that purpose, but 
that's obviously not what it's for and doesn't nest properly.  ML has a 
very elegant system for nested comments with (* and *).

Using an editor to throw #s in front of every line has limitations.  Your 
editor has to support it and you have to know how to use that feature.  Not 
exactly intuitive or easy for novices to pick up.  Also a pain if your 
preferred editor is python/perl/sh-agnostic.

Saying coders shouldn't use multiline comments to disable code misses the 
point.  Coders will comment out code regardless of the existence of 
multiline comemnts.  There has to be a better argument for leaving them out.

Keeping the language small and simple is desirable, but it's not an 
absolute.  A little syntactic sugar like 'for x in s' makes code easier to 
read than 'for i in len(s): x = s[i]'.  So what are the tradeoffs involved 
with nested multiline comments?  I'd like to understand the reasoning 
behind keeping them out.