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From: munck@mindspring.com (Robert Munck)
Subject: Re: Ada's Assembly Language Comments
Date: 1997/07/11
Message-ID: <33c64f72.260148537@news.mindspring.com>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 256203737
References: <y8xisHAeZ5uzYwIm@clanchy.demon.co.uk>
 <33bbbea9.8325807@news.mhtc.net> <0yQD$TAjanwzYw5m@clanchy.demon.co.uk>
X-Server-Date: 11 Jul 1997 15:41:56 GMT
Organization: Mill Creek Systems LC
Reply-To: munck@acm.org
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-07-11T15:41:56+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


On Tue, 8 Jul 1997 18:19:31 +0100, RC <rc1@clanchy.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>>Why does Ada have only the " -- " assembly language style, in-line
>>>comments and not block structured ones as in C or Pascal or better still
>>>nested block structured comments as in Modula 2?

This entire discussion strikes me as somewhat old-fashioned, 
80-column card thinking.  I rarely see Ada source (or PL/SQL,
an Ada-derived DB language) that doesn't have the comments
rendered in italics, a distinguishing color, a proportional font,
or all three. I generally view code through a web browser and
edit it with one of several multiple-language-sensitive editors
that can do such things.  This obviously makes it easy to
be certain what parts of the source are comments.

I'm also opposed to the practice of "commenting out" source
code.  In addition to the problems discussed in this thread,
I find that when I need to add or omit code statically for 
some purpose (debugging, performance measurement,
etc.), I need to do so in several different places.  If I 
use comment delimiters, it's easy to miss one of the
changes, leaving the omission or inclusion partially 
done.  Using conditional statements and changing a
single static boolean eliminates this danger.

Bob Munck
Mill Creek Systems LC