Description Jim des Rivieres 2003-01-08 17:10:19 EST

AST clients need a way to get at leading and trailing comments for statements 
(and other node types) so that they can do reasonable things like 
selecting/deleting/moving entire language construct. 

Part of the difficulty will be deciding on the rules for deciding which 
comments should be associated with which constructs. E.g.:

      // comment 1
      statement1(); // comment 2
      // comment 4
      // comment 5
      statement2(); // comment 6
                    // comment 7
      // comment 8
      statement3();

See bug 28268 for a discussion of the kinds of issues that arise in 
refactoring.

One possible approach to consider is adding new scanner-based utility so that 
a client can expand the source range of a node after-the-fact to include the 
leading and/or trailing comments and whitespace that naturally belong to a 
construct.