# comment character

[Anders Andersson]

In article <291 at ucdavis.UUCP> ccrrick at ucdavis.UUCP (Rick Heli) writes:
>Can anyone tell me why the # character is a comment in INTERACTIVE
>mode in the shell?  I mean, who goes around making comments that
>will never be seen again while running the shell in interactive
>mode?

Well, what function should # have in interactive mode then?
No function is also a kind of function. The idea is that things should
work the same regardless of mode -- imagine the problems if commands,
syntax etc. didn't behave the same when run from a file rather than
being typed in interactively. The consequent behaviour makes both
learning and debugging easy. Giving # a special "interactive" function
would merely increase documentation size and human brain load, instead
of functionality...