Re: Syntax of Comments (was: language design tradeoffs)

firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Wed, 23 Sep 1992 12:30:47 GMT

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language design tradeoffs kotula@milli.cs.umn.edu (1992-09-07)
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Newsgroups: comp.compilers
From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Organization: Software Engineering Institute
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1992 12:30:47 GMT
References: 92-09-048 92-09-134
Keywords: parse, design, Ada

crowl@jade.cs.orst.edu (Lawrence Crowl) writes:
>These issues were all addressed in the Ada Language Rationale. I've found
>Ada's comment syntax to be the best of any common language that I've used.


Thank you, thank you, thank you. We worked very hard on the Ada lexis,
and it's good to know somebody thinks we did a good job.


The main guiding principles behind the Ada comment convention were


(a) it must always be easy to distinguish comment from code


(b) it must be easy to associate the comment with the relevant code


(c) it must be as hard as possible for routine code maintenance
        inadvertently to violate (a) and (b)


(d) there should be a simple, automatic, *reversible* procedure for
        commenting out a block of code, along with any existing comments


Finally, let's give credit where it's due: the convention actually
used is not original to Ada. It was first introduced by BCPL.
--


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