I'm glad that everyone seemed to like the question (and surprising answer); I wondered whether people would object to the obscure nature of the problem.

This scenario came up when I started investigating the comparison of lines of text between stored procedures (http://jessesql.blogspot.com/2009/02/comparing-stored-procedures-part-1.html). I wanted to allow the possibility in the comparison of suppressing comments - that's when I discovered this rather odd feature of commenting.