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

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.
--

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.