doc-strings beginning with "*"

I've noticed that a lot of the doc-strings for functions and variables declared in C start with a "*". For example if I do C-h v bell-volume I get: `bell-volume' is a built-in integer variable. Value: 0 Documentation: *How loud to be, from 0 to 100. Looking at "sound.c" I see in vars_of_sound: DEFVAR_INT ("bell-volume", &bell_volume /* *How loud to be, from 0 to 100. */ ) Am I correct in assuming that this is a mistake? Someone put in "*" at the beginning of the comment not realizing that it would go into the docstring? Or should the DEFVAR_INT macro take care of this? Or does the "*" at the beginning of the docstring have some meaning? Inquiring minds want to know. If it's an error, it's a very common error, this occurs all over the place in the XEmacs C sources. I wonder if it's worth submitting a patch to fix these?