Decent editors have lexical highlighting as well as commenting selection; this argument cancels itself out. Personally I like having two block comment syntaxes

Decent editors have lexical highlighting as well as commenting selection; this argument cancels itself out. Personally I like having two block comment syntaxes to choose from, like Pascal's { } and (* * ); normal comments use { }, while if you want to comment out an entire block of the program and not have the comment terminate early, use (* and * ). Most of my professional life editing Pascal code was done from command-line editors that didn't have support for commenting the current selection, other than piping the selection through a command like sed. I appreciated being able to narrow down bugs using (* and *).