asterisks in comments fails compilation

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Software Bugs & Suggestions
1

Hi,

I found today very weird error, while writing my program. The exception I got while compiling was:

Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.StackOverflowError
  at java.util.Stack.push(Unknown Source)
  at com.oroinc.text.regex.Perl5Matcher._pushState(Perl5Matcher.java)
  at com.oroinc.text.regex.Perl5Matcher._match(Perl5Matcher.java)
   /+ many many lines like the last one

as I figured out, error was caused by putting many asterisks '' inside / */ comment, ie:

/*
**************************************** /x22 lines like this
*/

this bug/inconvience exists both in 0017 and 0018 IDEs.
Changing comments from /* */ to // solve this problem.

2

Some notes for whomever is investigating:

The Java regular expression library is notoriously bad at backtracking, especially with the Pattern.DOTALL option specified. The IDE needs to break up the search for beginning and end of a /.../ comment into two parts: if a comment begins with "/\*", then find the end "\*/". If possible, search for the end of the comment without relying on the DOTALL to search multiple lines. Search each line independently instead.

3

Java regular expression library is notoriously bad at backtracking

The IDE uses an old regex-lib from the jakarta project, not the java.util.regex package.

As a workaround you can always remove some of the 800 '' chars in your comment :smiley:
(Or split the comments in two parts 400 '' each)

Eberhard