[pro] #; comments...

[Pascal Costanza]

On 8 May 2012, at 20:02, Alessio Stalla wrote:

> On topic: the proposed syntactic addition is nice, but imho too
> trivial and too easily provided as a library to bother with a CDR
> (that would need to be included in each implementation).


Interesting discussion so far. (Alessio, I'm not responding to you directly, just as a stub for the discussion, so to speak… ;)

I can perfectly understand those who voiced their opinion that the existing mechanisms for commenting out s-expressions are good enough. (I especially liked the #+| here is a bug | variant that puts a comment in the feature expression.)

However, the suggestion that #; could just be put in a library is not a valid counter argument. The main reason for adding #; to a specification (and thus suggesting it as a quasi-standard for the language) is that it should be straightforward and simple to use it. Adding #; in any way makes only sense if it can be used in a considerably faster way than any other of the existing options. If I want to comment out an s-expression, I probably want to do this during development because I quickly want to try out a variant of my code. I don't want to be interrupted in my flow of thinking about the problem at hand when doing so. That's the very reason why I never use the #+(and) and #-(or) options, because they require me to think at least for a few seconds which way the operators go, and that disrupts what I'm actually interested in [1]. Likewise, I think, with the other options. I already find that placing a pair of #| |# around the s-expression in question takes far too much time than necessary.

I haven't decided yet whether I should go forward with the CDR or not...


Pascal


[1] They are intentionally chosen wrong in this sentence, and if you missed that, it proves my point.

--
Pascal Costanza
The views expressed in this email are my own, and not those of my employer.