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From: Stuart Palin <stuart.palin@0.0>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ideas for Ada 200X
Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 09:06:31 +0100
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Jeffrey Carter wrote:
> 
> Frank wrote:
> > What about the possibility of commenting several lines like /* ...... */?
> 
> This was considered and explicitly rejected by the original Ada design
> team as being too error-prone.
<snip>

And then they chose '--' as the comment delimiter!  I have
always found this rather odd as it seems to me to be a
potential source of 'difficult to spot' typo errors. 
Consider,

   The_Result := Meaningful_Ident_1 -- Meaningful_Ident_2
                 + Meaningful_Ident_3;

[OK Any decent form of testing should find the mistake - but
surely the intention was to reduce the likelihood of errors
getting through compilation]

I agree with the reasons for not allowing block comments,
but perhaps the choice of comment delimiter could be
considered.

--
Stuart Palin