From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Received: by 10.236.83.171 with SMTP id q31mr16700077yhe.13.1409705452926; Tue, 02 Sep 2014 17:50:52 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 10.50.39.113 with SMTP id o17mr530890igk.14.1409705452821; Tue, 02 Sep 2014 17:50:52 -0700 (PDT) Path: border1.nntp.ams3.giganews.com!backlog3.nntp.ams3.giganews.com!backlog3.nntp.ams.giganews.com!border1.nntp.ams.giganews.com!border2.nntp.ams.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!feeder2.cambriumusenet.nl!feeder1.cambriumusenet.nl!feed.tweaknews.nl!209.85.216.88.MISMATCH!dc16no687726qab.1!news-out.google.com!aw9ni2087igc.0!nntp.google.com!r2no13218182igi.0!postnews.google.com!glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2014 17:50:52 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <8fd27434-43c2-4bd1-b72b-dd7a0ef5af75@googlegroups.com> Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: glegroupsg2000goo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=66.126.103.122; posting-account=KSa2aQoAAACOxnC0usBJYX8NE3x3a1Xq NNTP-Posting-Host: 66.126.103.122 References: <8fd27434-43c2-4bd1-b72b-dd7a0ef5af75@googlegroups.com> User-Agent: G2/1.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: <50c9cfe2-caa7-4d0d-956e-6c7e99023f46@googlegroups.com> Subject: Re: Is there a way to do large block of source code comments From: Adam Beneschan Injection-Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 00:50:52 +0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Original-Bytes: 4220 Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:188817 Date: 2014-09-02T17:50:52-07:00 List-Id: On Tuesday, September 2, 2014 5:07:56 PM UTC-7, robin....@gmail.com wrote: > > No, this was explicitly omitted. See the Ada-83 Rationale 2.1: "Single = comments > > that are larger than one line are not provided. Such comments would req= uire a > > closing comment delimiter and this would again raise the dangers associ= ated with > > the (unintentional) omission of the closing delimiter: entire sections = of a > > program could be ignored by the compiler without the programmer realizi= ng it, so > > that the program would not mean what he thinks. Long comments can be wr= itten as > > a succession of single line comments, thus combining elegance with safe= ty." > When a block of code is to be omitted (temporarily or semi-permanently) > it's convenient to have something like /* and */ as comment markers. >=20 > It's also convenient to have comment markers for long blocks of comments. >=20 > Live parsing editors are useful tools, because they highlight > code segments (including comments). >=20 > The above quotation is mere hype, like the author's justification for omi= tting > exponentiation in Pascal, somehow more convenient to use log and exp inst= ead! No, the quotation was not hype. The problems caused by missing end-comment= delimiters were real. If you're thinking that this shouldn't be a problem because of "live parsin= g editors", you're right--in 2014. But the document that you claim contain= s "mere hype" is the Ada 83 Rationale, which came out in (drum roll) 1983. = (Or perhaps a bit later, but the rationales weren't rationalizations creat= ed after the fact.) Ada's development started several years before that. = The IBM PC came out in 1981, and it would have been some time before GUI ed= itors were available (Eclipse was first released on 2001). Before the PC, = the video systems that programmers had available for developing programs wo= uld have been monochrome terminals with one font (but perhaps with some bol= d-face and reverse-video capabilities) and no graphics. The screen-oriente= d editors I remember using for Pascal programming did not have any awarenes= s of program syntax, like today's tools do. Also, the same "live parsing editors" that are capable of coloring comments= so that you can see that you've forgotten the end delimiter, are also capa= ble of doing block comments. Eclipse has a command to do this in Java prog= rams, and it does so by adding // to the beginning of each selected line, n= ot by using /* and */ (which in Java programs is normally only used for "ja= vadoc" comments, comments that describe the the functionality and parameter= s of methods, that have a special format that can get translated to HTML). -- Adam=20