From: David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com>
To: Tom Ridge <tom.j.ridge+list@googlemail.com>
Cc: caml-list <caml-list@inria.fr>
Subject: RE: [Caml-list] Comment syntax?
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2016 13:11:04 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <E51C5B015DBD1348A1D85763337FB6D901351A1B8B@Remus.metastack.local> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CABooLwOu_xA+ubyUGVQOOGz1fey0=JRCAFK=Y5Bo3mt1zN1eSg@mail.gmail.com>
Tom Ridge wrote:
> Isn't this rather complicated?
Complicated? It's a trade-off, sure. Very occasionally (usually when writing comments about parsers) one is forced to insert an unexpected symbol into a comment in order to satisfy the parser.
> In this case, has there been any progress on "single line" comments eg
>
> // some comment
>
> ? I think this was mentioned recently on the list.
> (I am also aware that // is verboten for some reason).
// is "verboten" because it is already available as an operator, so using it as a comment would break existing code.
> It seems to me that multiline comments are a poor design choice. Single line
> comments permit commenting arbitrary blocks (just prepend each line with
> "//"), and play well with nested comments (no problem if a line starts
> "// //" etc). Also, they are very simple to implement in the lexer.
A nice feature of nestable multiline comments which you don't get with only single-line comments is that you do actually know where the end of the commented block is. The fact OCaml uses a bracket even means you get matching without any extra support in editors (% in Vim, etc.) :o)
> Please can we have support for simple (ie from the token "//" to the end-of-
> line, no messing with string literals etc) single line comments?
https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/671
I'm not sure I agree that having multiline comments is a poor design choice, but I agree it would (very occasionally) be nice to have single-line comments as well.
David
(PS While I don't believe that all top-posting is evil, these threads read back better in archives when bottom-posted...)
prev parent reply other threads:[~2016-09-14 13:11 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2016-09-14 12:34 Tom Ridge
2016-09-14 12:38 ` David Allsopp
2016-09-14 12:51 ` Tom Ridge
2016-09-14 13:04 ` Jeremy Yallop
2016-09-14 13:11 ` David Allsopp [this message]
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