Re: inline comments in future release?

> If you have so much code on one line that you feel the need for inline
> comments, you could, you know, break it up into multiple lines.

my point was about other peoples' code, including much of the stuff 
written by those whose thorough style I admire.  It's not that there's 
too much on the lines.  It's just that sometimes it would be nice to 
throw an extra word or two in there.  Ruby is supposed to read like 
English.  sometimes it would be totally appropriate to spruce up your 
grammar or clarify your nouns by putting comments in between your 
variables, methods, hash keys and class names.

I know that adding a crutch can have severe consequences and Matz has 
made important compromises that have worked out extremely well.  In fact 
I think one of the most significant was his work on disambiguation that 
allows us to usually forego parentheses.  Writing without parens not 
only makes the code more readable, it gives you natural clues about when 
things are ready to go on to the next line.  You basically do one thing 
on each line, usually call one method on each line (and then call 
methods to provide its arguments).  Sometimes the line gets long, but 
sometimes that's right for the situation.  I feel that the more tools 
you can use, the more able you are to find the right one for each 
situation.  Short lines are a great tool but code shouldn't be penalized 
for using long, descriptive names and offering bountiful options, or for 
programming functionally and with procs.  I know these can all be moved 
onto more lines to facilitate comments, and I do this, but how often do 
you see the comments there?  I tend to feel that if the trade-offs 
aren't too big, we could adopt this feature and let some people try it 
and others ignore it.  I can only guess that it would slow down the 
interpreter and therefore is an unlikely addition, but if that's not the 
case maybe it's worth a second thought as you read through all the code 
you see on github during the next week.

I'm reminded of one day when I suggested that it would be cool to have 
highlighting that could alert you when you needed to add parentheses in 
order to get the precedence you wanted.  Like now, I wasn't looking for 
a lecture.  I was just admiring Ruby's ability to nudge you in the right 
direction, and speculating about how we could maybe make it even 
stronger and more accessible.
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.