17435 2012-06-07 10:40:49 +0000 WebIDL: Bug in definition of whitespace terminal? 2012-06-22 06:31:58 +0000 1 1 1 Unclassified WebAppsWG WebIDL unspecified PC All RESOLVED FIXED P2 normal --- 1 wolfgangkeller cam mike public-script-coord public-webapps-bugzilla oldest_to_newest 68792 0 wolfgangkeller 2012-06-07 10:40:49 +0000 In the definition of the terminals in section "A. IDL grammar" you'll find the following definition of the whitespace terminal: whitespace = [\t\n\r ]+|[\t\n\r ]*((//.*|/\*.*?\*/)[\t\n\r ]*)+ Let's look at its part specific to block comments ("/* ... */"): /\*.*?\*/ What does this regular expression look for (see the referenced document http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl/pod/perlre.pod for details): a string '/*' followed by 0 or more "any character (except newline)", not greedily (the latter one follows by using '*?' instead of '*') followed by the string '*/'. What consequence does this have? The answer is that block comments can't contain newline characters between the block comment delimiters - I don't believe this is what you intend. Thus I believe, the regular expression has to be fixed. I propose the following fix, but better check it thrice for correctness: We change the part /\*.*?\*/ to /\*[.\n]*?\*/ Thus the complete definition of the whitespace terminal changes to whitespace = [\t\n\r ]+|[\t\n\r ]*((//.*|/\*[.\n]*?\*/)[\t\n\r ]*)+ 69339 1 cam 2012-06-22 06:31:58 +0000 You are right, although this needs to be written as (.|\n) rather than [.\n]. Fixed now: http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2006/webapi/WebIDL/Overview.xml.diff?r1=1.541;r2=1.542;f=h