Why doesn't this assemble for elf but does for pe?

[Stephen P. Smith]

It looks like no matter what I do below, the / functions as a comment 
character.  

$ i686-pc-elf-as --version
GNU assembler 030415 20030415
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no warranty.
This assembler was configured for a target of `i686-pc-elf'.

 380                  /*       
 381                  ;
 382                  ; Compute the size of each entry in the table, so 
that higher level code will be able to compute
 383                  ; addresses of each individual entry.
 384                  ;
 385                  */
 386                 
 387                  #NO_APP
 388                  .equ rawHandlerSize, ( common - RawHandlerTable 
)/numRawHandlers
 389                  .equ sps5, ( common - RawHandlerTable )
 390                  .equ sps6, sps5/numRawHandlers
 391                  #APP
 392                          .data
 393                 
 394 0000 60000000     spstest3:          .long numRawHandlers
 395 0004 08030000     spstest4:          .long sps5
 396 0008 08030000     spstest6:          .long sps6
 397