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

crowl@jade.cs.orst.edu (Lawrence Crowl) writes:


    Nested comments have the same problem as #ifdef, I can't tell by looking at
    a chunk of code that it is commented out. I have to search upwards in the
    text for a begin comment marker. Comments that only act on the current line
    are easy to find.


One can expect that the syntaxes of comments in programming languages will
become less and less relevant as a human factor.


Today already, many people use formatters, so comments can not be mistaken
for code in printed programs. Editing is another story, since structural
editors and browsers are not widely used for various reasons. Even the
so-called "literate programs" are still edited with conventional editors,
using awkward syntaxes, for lack of adequate tools... However, skipping
commented out portions of a Lisp program (Lisp has nested comments) or
ifdef-ed out portions of C code can be done today as a minor extension of
the tags program under emacs.


Hopefully, the machines will soon be the only ones to view programs as
merely streams of bytes.


V. Delacour
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