Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!otter!kers From: kers@otter.hpl.hp.com (Chris Dollin) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: language commenting constructs Message-ID: <2400021@otter.hpl.hp.com> Date: 15 Mar 89 09:47:42 GMT References: Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK. Lines: 25 Warning: Comment Style Religious Feeling Follows. gaynor@athos.rutgers.edu (Silver) says: | 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'? Probably some lazy language designer who wrote a baby compiler | 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. 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. Once a language designer has made the blunder of having bracketed comments in the language, the pressure is on him to allow them to be nested. The solution is simple: have only end-of-line comments. Voila! "Any reasonable editor" will be able to block-comment as required. Every comment line will be marked, so the "damn! it was commented out!" errors will go away (he said optimistically). So what's the problem? Regards, | "Every now and again, I can't resist them temptation to indulge Kers. | in an apparently-subjective war."