I'd argue the editor rather than the reader. Readers can't be too specialised, they have to work with a large variety of programs, so it's not going to know it

I'd argue the editor rather than the reader. Readers can't be too specialised, they have to work with a large variety of programs, so it's not going to know it's looking at code, let alone parsing it, unless the editor tells it. Instead the editor should have an accessible interface that only passes up the comment text to the reader, perhaps annotated with a "comment" role or something.