From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id CAA30120 for caml-redistribution; Tue, 23 Jun 1998 02:49:38 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id KAA29663 for ; Mon, 22 Jun 1998 10:51:23 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from pauillac.inria.fr (pauillac.inria.fr [128.93.11.35]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id KAA03125; Mon, 22 Jun 1998 10:51:17 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from xleroy@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id KAA11356; Mon, 22 Jun 1998 10:51:17 +0200 (MET DST) Message-ID: <19980622105117.39832@pauillac.inria.fr> Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 10:51:17 +0200 From: Xavier Leroy To: Donald Syme , fbesnard Cc: "'caml-list@inria.fr'" Subject: Re: per-line comments References: <01BD9A03.1CEE4A80@FB> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.89.1 In-Reply-To: ; from Donald Syme on Thu, Jun 18, 1998 at 03:05:29AM +0100 Sender: weis > > - there is no 'per line' comment (like Ada's "--" or C++'s "//" ) ? > I too think this is a must. It may not quite accord with the personal > tastes of the CaML implementors, 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... > 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 -- ? > I figure they should be > able to transfer their "existing practice" when they make the switch to > CaML, just to make the switch as painless as possible. Depends from which background you come. E.g. for a well-trained C programmer, delimited comments make more sense. 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. - Xavier Leroy