modify-syntax-entry with single and two character comments

[Spike Ilacqua]

I'm trying to build a syntax table for a language that as two comment 
modes.  "|" starts a single line comment, and works like "#" in Perl. 
"|* ... *|" can contain a comment and may be multiple lines, basically 
the same a C's "/* ... */".  I've tried a number of variations and the 
closest I get is:

    (modify-syntax-entry ?\n ">" st)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?\| "<1b4b" st)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?\* ".2b3b" st)


which works for "|* ... *|" and recognizes "|" as the start of a comment 
but doesn't see a newline as the end of a comment that starts with "|". 
 This on the other hand:

    (modify-syntax-entry ?\n ">b" st)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?\| "<b14" st)
    (modify-syntax-entry ?\* ".23" st)

Doesn't recognize the "|* .. *|" comments.  Any suggestions on how to 
make this work?

One note, I have:

     (list "\\(||\\)" 1 '(1 . nil))

in the font-lock-syntactic-keywords to make sure that "||" isn't treated 
as a comment.  But I don't think that's part of the problem.


Thanks,
->Spike