Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!hwcs!zen!vic From: vic@zen.UUCP (Victor Gavin) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: language commenting constructs Message-ID: <1543@zen.UUCP> Date: 13 Mar 89 12:59:16 GMT References: Reply-To: vic@zen.UUCP (Victor Gavin) Organization: Zengrange Limited, Leeds, England Lines: 37 In article gaynor@rutgers.edu writes: >I find the inability to nest comments (in langauges which provide delimited >comments) very unfriendly. Whoever came up with the bright idea that this is a >`feature'? I've never heard anyone state that this type of comment is a `feature'. That's like saying that passing parameters by reference is a `feature', because the languages you've used have never done that. > Probably some lazy language designer who wrote a baby compiler to >test a new language, and found that it was slightly easier for him to implement >it without nesting, so he defined it thus. A black day. Don't be stupid. Just coz you don't like comments this way is no reason to be so critical of the people that design and write languages. If you don't like the facilities offered by a particular language then change to a language which works the way you want it to. Alternatively you can write a pre-processor to strip out comments the way you like -- just don't expect much in the way of portability! > This has led to more >bugs than I care to remember or imagine. When was the last time this dead >horse was kicked? I think it's time to kick it again, given the number of >postings about comments causing errors. People have problems in any language that they do not understand/comprehend, that's why there a lot of people who are able to make money teaching others how to program. I program in C (which I would guess is the language that you are having a go at) and find that I can manage to write comments without making the mistakes you seem to. >Regards, [Ag] gaynor@rutgers.edu vic