From: Mark Slagell <mslagell@...>
Date: 2000-10-13T21:38:13+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:5503] Re: 2 ideas from Haskell

hal9000@hypermetrics.com wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> In article <39E609EF.4A7672D6@iastate.edu>,
>   Mark Slagell <ms@iastate.edu> wrote:
> > Do either of these interest anyone:
> >
> > 1. a "literate mode" that assumes all lines in a script are comments
> > unless the first column is a special character (Haskell uses '>').
> >
> 
> Hmmm... not on my Top Ten list of features. I think =begin/=end are
> basically enough...

I have to disagree there: the =begin/=end scheme distinguishes comments
from code easily from the interpreter's standpoint but not from the
reader's (who has to look around for delimiters); it makes it a little
easier to write comments but in the end makes it harder to read them.

Allowing the option to swap the code/comments default doesn't have that
first-glance-ambiguity problem, and is a way to facilitate _very_
literate programming, where there are often more comments than code. 
This may be of little concern to most of you (rubyists seem to abhor
comments as much as perlists do! yeah, flame away at me for that :-) but
it also allows some interesting possibilities such as being able to feed
something essentially like natual-language documentation to the
interpreter, peppered here and there with bits of real code.

  Mark