Re: String reboot - (1a) incidental whitespace

[Guy Steele]

> On Apr 18, 2019, at 8:04 PM, John Rose <john.r.r...@oracle.com> wrote:
> . . .
> One reason people hate those extra stars in comments is
> that they are using an editor (like Emacs) which is pretty
> good at generic indentation, but doesn't know about
> language-specific left margin markup, like stars or
> (in Guy's second proposal) single quotes.

Actually, Emacs in Java mode does know quite a bit about doc comments.  If you 
are in the middle of a doc comment:

        (1) If you open up a blank line and type *, the indentation of the star 
automatically matches that of the leading star on the preceding line.

        (2) If you’re within a doc comment and type Meta-J to insert a line 
break (a routine thing to do in Emacs), a correctly indented star (and a space) 
are supplied on the new line after the break.

        (3) If you use Meta-Q to fill (that is, rejustify) a paragraph, all the 
right things happen to maintain the stars even as the line breaks and number of 
lines in the paragraph change.  I do this all the time.

        (4) If you set these variables as follows:
                        comment-style           extra-line
                        comment-start           “/* “
                        comment-end             “ */“
            then the command Meta-; will create a new doc comment, properly 
indented stars and all, around the text you have selected.
            (If you don’t set those variables as indicated, the default for 
Java is to use // comments instead.)