Hi,
I agree that it's very nice to have highlighted re's if possible.
What if we did something like matching r"(?#) … " as a regular expression string? The would give us something explicit to match, but it would also mean you'd have to add it to any of your preexisting re's.
That sounds like a very good idea. It would be pretty easy to find regexes and sub in a '(?#)' comment marker (I had to look up what that one was!) so one would have regex syntax highlighting in existing code, while keeping the 'raw strings are just raw strings' folks happy. For those who complain that r'(?# might just be the beginning of some particular, non-regex raw string, well.... too bad! ;)
To be honest, I don't really like this idea too much (in lieu of having to use re.*(r" ... ") in order to get the regex highlight, let's say).
While adding a (?#) is "harmless" in terms of the parsing of the actual code, changing your code to fit your text editor just doesn't "feel" right. More tangibly, I think it's probably "the wrong thing to do" if you're working on a project w/ other people (especially if they're not fellow TextMate users). The code won't break, but I could imagine that the extra line noise could tick people off and add some bit-rot to your version control ...
-steve