From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2008-07-27T20:04:47+09:00
Subject: Re: inline comments in future release?

On 25.07.2008 00:30, Mike Schwab wrote:
> fair point, it can make things hard to read if you're not careful
> 
> my main concern is that so much code goes uncommented, and the rdoc 
> comments being outside the body of the method contributes to an attitude 
> that allows this.
> 
> so many of the quality ruby libraries are so flexible and so meta that 
> it would be great to have more blow-by-blow explanations sometimes!

That's more a question of programmer discipline than of having inline 
comments available.  I doubt there is much good code around that 
actually comments /in line/.  If you have an expression that large that 
you need to individually comment on parts then you probably either 
choose bad variable names or crafted a too complex expression in the 
first place.

Note also that you can break up expressions in a way that you can use 
line comments to comment parts if you wish so:

robert@fussel ~
$ ruby <<XXX
 > x = 1 + # basic offset
 > 10 + # another unimportant number
 > 123 # the final value
 > puts x
 > XXX
134

robert@fussel ~
$

A similar thing can be done with regular expressions using /x switch.

Kind regards

	robert