Apostrophe in star comment breaking the color code and readability

[amalcor]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Description

Hello,
I'm quite new to fotran, and currently facing two problems with the fortran extension a lot of comment with an apostrophe : ' character and also starting with a star : *.

If a comment like that exists in a F90 file, it is not recognized as a command, and the apostrophe breaks the readability of the rest of the file :
*----- Excuse me, I'm a simple comment

Is this a bug or issue of the plugin, or are there any tricks to fix this issue locally, and activate the parsing of * starting line as comment in F90 files ?

Exemples :

program hello !---- Test' print *, 'Hello World' end program hello
works but :

program hello *---- Test' print *, 'Hello World' end program hello
don't

Screenshots

No response

Expected Behaviour

Appropriate formatting

Version of Modern Fortran

v3.4.2023032301

Version of Visual Studio Code

v1.76

Platform and Architecture

Linux

[gnikit]

That's because * are not standard comment characters, the ! is

[amalcor]

Ok thanks for your reply. Would you advise it is not pertinent to implement anything regarding my issue in the module, and only fix this locally ? I suppose I would need to change fortran_free-form.tmLanguage.json lines 1255 to 1259 from :

"comments": {
  "name": "comment.line.fortran",
  "begin": "!",
  "end": "(?=\\n)"
},

to

"comments": {
  "name": "comment.line.fortran",
  "begin": "!|\*",
  "end": "(?=\\n)"
},

[gnikit]

* is a reserved operator and format selector. I am relatively certain that the TextMate grammar regular expressions would struggle to distinguish between

a_cal = a * b ** 2 * a comment

The snippet that you provided btw is Fixed Form, not FreeForm. There are different syntax highlighting rules for Fixed Form, which work perfectly fine for your case

You should set the Language Mode for your file to Fortran77 (which is an alias for FortranFixedForm)