revence27/coffee-script — comment on commit 53078ff7d525f48d6f185e82c0ef56feeb8dfebb
File:  line 0
By revence27:

No, when you need tools to ignore a preamble that is not “Literate CoffeeScript”, then you should use the file extension, `.literatecoffee`.
Your suggestion would make your comment, for example, pass as Literate CoffeeScript, even though it is not. :o) When the design is of something that executes arbitrary code, wooly heuristic tests are a strict no-no.

Or, tools that generate this stuff from the Literate CoffeeScript could be told to skip the first line (which, in their case, is generally easy to do).
Making the test any more complex than checking for exactly two tokens (known to be illegal in that position under valid CoffeeScript) would throw us back to having to use heuristics and, ultimately, to having false positives/negatives.

We should be readier to evolve new tools to work with Literate CoffeeScript (as @jashkenas said, regarding Docco) than to make the compiler less-correct. Beauty for the win.