>Perhaps the time has come for a comment to be a comment and for all contents, including ; , to be ignored. I see no useful purpose in continuation of comment lines.

But I think changing it now would break existing code. Can't say I've ever intentionally continued a comment, but I'm sure there are folks out there who have. I guess I can see it as most likely in something of this form:

NOTE: This is the header comment. It's continued ;
      and indented so it looks pretty and stands out ;
      from the page.

Don't know how many people actually use the NOTE keyword, though.

Tamar