Re: nested comments, 3

[Kent Karlsson <kent>]

Original-Via: uk.ac.ukc; Thu, 20 Sep 90 12:10:21 BST
From: Kent Karlsson <kent>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 90 12:23:45 +0200
To: haskell@cs.glasgow.ac.uk
Subject: Re:  nested comments, 3
Original-Sender: kent%se.chalmers.cs@sunic.sunet.se
Sender: haskell-request@cs.glasgow.ac.uk

		On the third alternative
		-------------------------

But there is a third alternative:

>	Another route is to take the minimalist view of the ADA
>	designers, which is:
>	
>	  there is NO block comment rule which is entirely safe from
>	  accidental closure of the comment.
>	
>	This lead them to -- commenting out the rest of the line, as
>	the ONLY comment syntax. To comment out a block, invoke your
>	powerful text editor - not too hard these days.

   I agree, though I do NOT think that "--" is the typographically best
choice to mark the beginning of a comment.  E.g. "@@@" is MUCH more visible,
and and I think that comments really should be clearly visible.
(And it is more likely that someone wants to use "--" as an operator...)

   Having ONLY to-end-of-line comments also has the GREAT advantage that
the comment mark is clearly visible even if MANY lines, even several pages,
are comments.  Recall the (other) "C-ism" (which is only a convention):

/*
** ...
** ...
** ...
*/


   Annotations (another use for block comments) can also be terminated
by end-of-line...  Even conditional compilation can be done in such a way:
		...
###MAC###	...	@@@ MacIntoch specific code.
###MAC###	...
###SUN###	...	@@@ Sun specific code.
###DEC###	...	@@@ Dec specific code.
		...

			/kn