Re: [Caml-list] single-line comment request

[Jeff Henrikson <jehenrik@yahoo.com>]

Though I favor the addition of the single line comments, most of the 
comments thus far seem to be very subjective.  I find the "80+ percent 
of comments in the existing sources are single line comment" fairly 
weighty.  I also find the following unmentioned idea significant: 
single line comments save large number of keystrokes when substituting 
different chunks of code during testing.  Also adding printfs.  And any 
comment-compile-uncomment-compile situation.  It's a fairly specific 
task, but also a pronounced difference when it happens.

I find a lot of the "no-single-comment" arguments to be sounding 
remarkably reductionist in the way the "we don't need GUI" arguments 
that certain die hard UNIX users purvey.  The comment character is a 
user interface for a programming language.  Let's make it a nice one.  
OCaml already breaks backward compatibility often.  And for whatever 
branches of OCaml are out there, any backport would be trivial.

BTW, I kind of don't like ##, because it's a shift key.  There are no 
single char symbols left, okay.  But that's true for C(++) as well, 
hence the "//".  What's wrong with //?  I see that it's an "operator 
char" in the language definition lexical conventions.  I'm not sure if 
that's a big deal.  I'd like "--" also.  Same op-ch issue.


Jeff Henrikson

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