comment block curiosity

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Emboldened by Bart's showing how fundamental syntax might be aliased, 
and knowing how dangerous that might be, yet I thought I'd play with 
that.  I've always thought we should have block comments and of course 
you can fake it very well with:

   : <<COMMENTBLOCK

   foo
   bar
   baz

   COMMENTBLOCK

... But I thought I'd try to alias that because I keep forgetting the " 
: << " syntax.  So:

   alias startcomment=': <<COMMENTBLOCK'
   alias endcomment='COMMENTBLOCK'

   echo about to start a comment:

   startcomment        # This actually works believe it or not.

   foo
   bar
   baz

   endcomment         # This is ignored, it doesn't work but no error
   either.
   COMMENTBLOCK       # This ends the comment.

   echo back to working code.


You'd think that "endcomment' would be the alias more likely to work but 
it it doesn't.  Why?  Can it be fixed?