Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!ai-lab!life!tmb From: tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) Newsgroups: comp.editors Subject: Re: Sticky Note Comments In Programs Message-ID: Date: 29 Dec 90 11:30:16 GMT References: <20903@oolong.la.locus.com> Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 22 In-reply-to: jfr@locus.com's message of 28 Dec 90 21:29:59 GMT In article <20903@oolong.la.locus.com> jfr@locus.com (Jon Rosen) writes: Food for thought: The "sticky note" concept (those little yellow things from 3M) is a superb documentation concept [...]. In these add-ins, the user can "open up" a "sticky note" anywhere in a file [...] The "sticky notes" are kept hidden but can reappear at the click of a function key or mouse button... Of course, we would need several things, not the least of which would be new types of file support, editor support and possibly compiler support... This would also tend to limit the portability of a program commented in this fashion... But the productivity increase might be enough to offset these penalties... Anyway, any comments? You can get virtually the same effect by selectively hiding and selecting code in GNU Emacs. Take a look at "hideif.el" in the Emacs distribution. You could extend hideif to special comment format (e.g., you might enclose "hideable" comments with /*[ ... ]*/). The advantages of such an approach would be that it does not require new file formats or tools, and that it requires only a minimum of hacking.