From: Pierre Weis <Pierre.Weis@inria.fr>
Message-Id: <199806230024.CAA20345@pauillac.inria.fr>
Subject: Re: per-line comments
To: Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr (Xavier Leroy)
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 1998 02:24:23 +0200 (MET DST)
In-Reply-To: <19980622105117.39832@pauillac.inria.fr> from "Xavier Leroy" at Jun 22, 98 10:51:17 am
[French abstract ahead]
> Caml's comment syntax is more a question of historical tradition than
> personal tastes. After all, the comment syntax is perhaps the only
> bit of syntax that hasn't changed between LCF ML, Caml, and Standard ML...
Even this bit of syntax has changed: LCF ML comments where % blabla %
> > but many good programmers use this
> > extensively in their in-line documentation.
>
> I don't quite get the point about in-line documentation. I write
> perfectly fine on-line documentation between (* and *). Why would it
> be any better with // or -- ?
Right. But many programmers feel it simpler to end the comment with a
carriage return (if not for the historical trick of being able to put
a new instruction after the comment and to reuse the same card upface
down! This is a dinosaure's story from the good old time of real
computers that knew the meaning of a column :)
> At any rate, the main problem with per-line comments (as with most
> syntax extension) is that they need a reserved symbol. Both // and --
> are valid OCaml infix identifiers; // is even used in the Num standard
> library module.
Perfectly exact and pertinent. Even the (* delimitor is a problem when
you want to name operators, since (+), (-), (/) work perfectly but you
must use extra spaces for the multiplication.
However, the old meaning of % in old LCF ML, was carried to Caml, and
may be for this historical reason the % character is not in the
list of operators for Caml Light or O'Caml. Thus it is usable as a
comment delimitor, if not more useful for another purpose.
In addition, per-line comments can be a simple way to have comments that are
``free style'' comments, as opposed to the actual comments that must
be a suite of lexically correct tokens.
Thus it is possible to add per-line comments, but Xavier pointed out
the main problem: is it desirable to add this feature to the langage?
[Résumé en Français]
Xavier a raison: -- et // sont déjà pris. D'ailleurs (* pose déjà un
problème avec la syntaxe des opérateurs infixes (il faut écrire ( * )
pour la multiplication alors que ces blancs sont non nécessaires pour
les autres opérateurs). Ceci dit % est inutilisé (et il a toujours
signifié début de commentaire depuis le début de ML et même en Caml
jusqu'à 1991) et pourrait servir à faire des commentaires uni-lignes
(et à l'occasion des commentaires qui ne sont pas une suite de lexèmes
valides du langage). Mais est-ce vraiment nécessaire ?
Pierre Weis
INRIA, Projet Cristal, Pierre.Weis@inria.fr, http://pauillac.inria.fr/~weis/
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