go/printer: "Line of stars" detection false positive for commented out block of code with each line dereferencing a pointer.

[dmitshur]

What version of Go are you using (go version)?

go version go1.4.2 darwin/amd64

What operating system and processor architecture are you using?

OS X 10.10.5, amd64.

What did you do?

Consider the following program:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    var i [3]int
    p0 := &i[0]
    p1 := &i[1]
    p2 := &i[2]

    *p0 = 5
    *p1 = 6
    *p2 = 7

    fmt.Println("Hello, playground:", *p0, *p1, *p2)
}

If you comment out the first block of code and run gofmt on it, you get:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    /*
        var i [3]int
        p0 := &i[0]
        p1 := &i[1]
        p2 := &i[2]
    */

    *p0 = 5
    *p1 = 6
    *p2 = 7

    fmt.Println("Hello, playground:", *p0, *p1, *p2)
}

However, if you comment out the second block of code like this:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    var i [3]int
    p0 := &i[0]
    p1 := &i[1]
    p2 := &i[2]

    /*
    *p0 = 5
    *p1 = 6
    *p2 = 7
    */

    fmt.Println("Hello, playground:", *p0, *p1, *p2)
}

What did you expect to see?

After formatting the above code with gofmt, I would expect it to be formatted similarly to when any other piece of code is commented out, so it should be:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    var i [3]int
    p0 := &i[0]
    p1 := &i[1]
    p2 := &i[2]

    /*
        *p0 = 5
        *p1 = 6
        *p2 = 7
    */

    fmt.Println("Hello, playground:", *p0, *p1, *p2)
}

What did you see instead?

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    var i [3]int
    p0 := &i[0]
    p1 := &i[1]
    p2 := &i[2]

    /*
    *p0 = 5
    *p1 = 6
    *p2 = 7
     */

    fmt.Println("Hello, playground:", *p0, *p1, *p2)
}

Which is not consistent with anything.

I'm pretty sure I know why it happens. It has to do with go/printer detecting a so called "line of stars" style of comments, which normally look like this:

/*
 * Line
 * of
 * stars.
 */

See relevant code at https://github.com/golang/go/blob/467a2cb73ca867ccdb1dd22be220fa51b6d52491/src/go/printer/printer.go#L529-L539.

However, in this case, it's not a comment block because there is no space after the * as in normally formatted comments, it's just commented out code that happens to falsely trigger the line of stars comment block handling.

[griesemer]

I probably went overboard trying to recognize the "Line of stars".

This might be easily fixable by recognizing the "Line of stars" only if stars followed by text have a blank after the star. Of course, for "* p = 0" this would still fail, but people tend to write "p" rather than " p".

Another option might be to simply remove the "Line of stars" logic.

Not urgent.

[dmitshur]

This might be easily fixable by recognizing the "Line of stars" only if stars followed by text have a blank after the star. Of course, for "* p = 0" this would still fail, but people tend to write "p" rather than " p".

Yep.

Another option might be to simply remove the "Line of stars" logic.

I was thinking that too, and if possible, I think it's a better solution because it's a chance to make Go a little simpler. I've seen a lot of Go code, and line of stars is exceedingly rare. It seems it'd be better not to have it.

Not urgent.

Agreed. I filed this simply to track the issue, since I had encountered it just recently.