Re: possibility of java style // end of line comments?

Tuesday, October 14, 2008, 11:28:02 PM, Newman, John W wrote:

> Hi,
>  
> I’m working on a template now that is exceptionally complicated. 
> So complicated, that for once I’m actually writing comments in it.  :-o
>  
> It’s less than ideal to always have to close them with --], it
> would be nice if FM added some kind of // like feature.  Just a
> random idea I figured I’d pass on to kick around for 2.4.  But I do
> remember years ago when I wrote a lexer & parser for a java variant,
> and both /* and // were surprisingly difficult to handle.

That's not the real problem, Jonathan is a smart guy... ;-) The
problem with all the syntactical shortcuts (because we have seen a few
proposals in that topic) that they complicate the language rules, and
for a template language that's seldom acceptable, since it's something
that people should learn as quickly as possible and then also remember
it if they don't use the language every day. More general purpose
languages can accept themselves more. For this reason I'm reluctant to
vote for any additional syntactical tricks... Of course I know that in
some applications they are quite much desirable, but the interest of
the majority is more important. (I think the only way to address these
kind of issues is that the engine has a better architecture that makes
it easy to define and correctly treat(!) alternative template
languages.)

> -John

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


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