Re: per-line comments

[Pierre Weis <Pierre.Weis@inria.fr>]

[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/