Re: Is there a way to do large block of source code comments

[robin.vowels@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, September 3, 2014 10:50:53 AM UTC+10, Adam Beneschan wrote:
> 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 require a
> 
> > > closing comment delimiter and this would again raise the dangers associated with
> 
> > > the (unintentional) omission of the closing delimiter: entire sections of a
> 
> > > program could be ignored by the compiler without the programmer realizing it, so
> 
> > > that the program would not mean what he thinks. Long comments can be written as
> 
> > > a succession of single line comments, thus combining elegance with safety."
> 
> 
> 
> > When a block of code is to be omitted (temporarily or semi-permanently)
> 
> > it's convenient to have something like /* and */ as comment markers.
> 
> > 
> 
> > It's also convenient to have comment markers for long blocks of comments.
> 
> > 
> 
> > Live parsing editors are useful tools, because they highlight
> 
> > code segments (including comments).
> 
> > 
> 
> > The above quotation is mere hype, like the author's justification for omitting
> 
> > exponentiation in Pascal, somehow more convenient to use log and exp instead!
> 
> 
> 
> No, the quotation was not hype.

Certainly was hype. And Pascal came out well before Ada did.

>  The problems caused by missing end-comment delimiters were real.
 
Really?
 
> If you're thinking that this shouldn't be a problem because of "live parsing
> editors", you're right--in 2014.

They were around from at least by the 1990s.

>  But the document that you claim contains "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
> created 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 editors were available (Eclipse was first released on 2001).
>  Before the PC, the video systems that programmers had available for
> developing programs would have been monochrome terminals with one font
> (but perhaps with some bold-face and reverse-video capabilities)
> and no graphics.  The screen-oriented editors I remember using for Pascal
> programming did not have any awareness of program syntax,
> like today's tools do.