Question

What’s the correct method for defining multi-line comments in an emacs mode (like C’s /* */)? The elisp examples I see are for comments that start with a single delimiter and end at the end of the line (like C++’s // or perl’s #).

Answer 1

It’s like this:

(define-derived-mode my-mode     awk-mode 'my'     'My mode'   (setq comment-multi-line nil) ; maybe   (setq comment-start '/* ')   (setq comment-end '*/')) 

But there are subtleties; maybe you want

/*  line one   */ /*  line two   */ /*  line three */ 

or maybe you want

/*       line one     line two     line three */ 

This is affected by your comment-style, which you can customize (M-x customize-variable comment-style). For something like the first example choose indent, for the second example, extra-line.

It’s all defined in newcomment.el, which you can read about if you M-x describe-variable comment-start.