Cannot comment in a view before first statement

Question

My apologies if this is the wrong group/forum for this question.
I'm creating views using SQL Developer and noticed quickly that under some circumstances my comments were disappearing when I saved the view. What I mean is that I would save a view and the next time I went to edit it the comment would be gone. Further research revealed the following:
CREATE OR REPLACE MY_VIEW
AS
-- THIS COMMENT WILL DISAPPEAR WHEN I SAVE THIS VIEW
SELECT *
FROM MY_TABLE
CREATE OR REPLACE MY_VIEW
AS
SELECT *
-- THIS COMMENT WILL NOT DISAPPEAR WHEN I SAVE THIS VIEW
FROM MY_TABLE
Can you really not have any comments before the first keyword in a view?
Any information you can share will be appreciated.
Carl

Answer 1

Hi Carl,
Another way with DBMS_METADATA.GET_DDL, e.g,
SQL> set serveroutput on
SQL>
SQL> CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW vw AS (
  2     -- some comment
  3     SELECT
  4        dummy
  5     FROM dual
  6     );
View created
SQL> begin
  2    dbms_output.put_line( dbms_metadata.get_ddl('VIEW','VW','SYS') );
  3  end;
  4  /
  CREATE OR REPLACE FORCE VIEW "SYS"."VW" ("DUMMY") AS
   -- some comment
   SELECT
      dummy
   FROM dual
PL/SQL procedure successfully completedRegards,
Christian Balz