Re: nested comments, 1

[Kent Karlsson <kent>]

Original-Via: uk.ac.ukc; Thu, 20 Sep 90 11:50:50 BST
From: Kent Karlsson <kent>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 90 12:21:45 +0200
To: haskell@cs.glasgow.ac.uk
Subject: Re:  nested comments, 1
Original-Sender: kent%se.chalmers.cs@sunic.sunet.se
Sender: haskell-request@cs.glasgow.ac.uk

		On the first alternative
		------------------------

> (1) things like "-}" inside a string may "catch" an outer nested comment, and
...
> With regard to (1), I thought I made it pretty clear in my message
> that we were making no attempt at solving that particular problem.

   Yes, it was made clear, but that still does *not* make it better!!

> On the other hand, I'm not sure that I agree with Kent that it's
> reasonable to require strings in nested comments to be properly
> constructed.  I can imagine writing:

   WriteFile file quote    -- write " to file

   But the " in the line above is *not* the beginning of a string (it's
inside a to-end-of-line comment), so there would be no problem, here...
But now that you mention it, alternative 1 has to be mended once again,
since e.g.

   WriteFile file ['"']   -- or do I really have to write a backslash
   			  -- in front of the double quote sign?

still would cause a problem.  (I leave the details to the reader, but
single quotes (or apostrophes if you like) must(?) now be banned from
identifiers...)

> remove the ambiguity (but I found it humorous that he initially made
> the same error (2) that was in my solution :-).

Yes, well, sorry about the error, but it was quite a different error,
though the symptoms were similar.  I might find it humorous (:-) that the
 ncomment  syntax in the report also has *that* **and** *one other* error:
   -  any  *never* generates "{-" nor "-}"     :-) :-) 
   - even if that is mended, the problem still persists, due to the (outer) loop.
     (This is the error I made in my first attempt at the "first alternative".)

			/kn