From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2001-07-05T14:11:09+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:17275] Re: /* */ comments

> Whoops, maybe that means I'm too late to weigh in against /* */ :-)

Maybe, maybe not. I'm with you on this.

> But one thing Guy's example shows, in addition to the parsing
> problems, is how it would look to have both # and /* */ mixed in
> together.  (I know Guy wasn't aiming to do a style/aesthetic demo, but
> still.)  Personally I don't think the mixture will look very good.

I agree, though I don't hate this a tenth as much as Another Piece
of Proposed Syntax that I won't bring up right now. (Why is there
so little workplace violence in Lisp shops?  :)

And Bill Kelly's point is not totally trivial either. Any regex ending
in a star and a slash is going to be a special case. 

That's a few more lines of code in the lexer or whatever... and 
another confusing case for syntax-highlighting editors.

As for Guy's (excellent) point, I think it boils down to whether
embedded docs or comments have "precedence" -- as far as
I'm aware, that's the only real issue. The other stuff needs to be
addressed, but I don't think there's a semantic decision to be
made there.

> If we're definitely going in that direction (as opposed to something
> like #{...} or %#{...}), would /# #/ be possible?  I think it would
> harmonize better visually than /* */.

Probably I'd prefer #{} or %#{} (the former, I think).

Whoever made the remark about every keystroke being 
excruciating agony made me grin, but that's rather what
I'm like. Like one of the creators of UNIX (which was it?),
I hate typing. I'm glad to type "ls" instead of "list" and so on.

And one thing I dislike about /# -- go ahead and laugh -- is
that it's an unshifted character followed by a shifted character.
That's where half my typos come from.

Computers sure are easier on _Star Trek_, eh? 
Or _2001_... right, Dave?

Hal