Re: [PATCH] Fixed incomplete and incorrect treatment of comments and trailing whitespace

[Tim Rice]

Hi Dima,

> I haven't tested this yet, but that wasn't my intent. Comments should do
> what they do in perl and python and awk and everywhere else, so the last
> line should be interpreted as "1,2". I may have made a mistake in the
> implementation.

It's not a good analogy, because datamash isn't a programming language, and the 
data it consumes does not have a programmatical grammar.

A more correct analogy is to consider how Awk handles comments *in the data 
consumed by Awk*, not within Awk scripts.

You can see what I mean if you do this:

```
$ echo '1,2#This is a comment#,3' | awk -F, '{print $2}'
2#This is a comment#
```

So we see, even though the hash symbol is used as a comment in Awk, Awk does 
not strip it from input data.

I agree with what Shawn said: stripping comments in general is not in the remit 
of Datamash. It wasn't really a good idea to permit whole-line comments in the 
first place, since this can easily be handled by sed. It's only regretful that 
we can't really roll back the over-reach now.

Still, even though we can't roll it back, at least we shan't compound the 
misstep by making comments even more complicated.

~ Tim