Apparent problem with looking-at?

[Peter Milliken <PeterM@resmed.com.au>]

Hi, I have some elisp that has been unchanged for several major versions of
EMacs now - it nolonger works in version 21.2.1. 

I am currently running Emacs 21.2.1 built using cygwin tools on a NT
platform. The situation is that I (normally) comment out lines in code files
I am working on and then wish to remove the comments later on i.e.

/* <some text> */

Note that the comment start (.c file) is located at the beginning of line.
The elisp code snippet looks like this:

   (beginning-of-line)
   (if (looking-at comment-start)

The (looking-at comment-start) returns nil. I don't believe it should return
nil and never has in previous versions of Emacs. If I alter the code snippet
to (looking-at "/*") then it works (note the absence of the space after the
'*'). Also, if I place a space character at the start of the line i.e.

 /* <some text> */

and run the original code (testing for comment-start with point at the BOL)
then the test returns t.

Thanks
Peter

Peter Milliken
Software Engineer
ResMed
Phone: +61 2 9886-5059