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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@shell01.TheWorld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ideas for Ada 200X
Date: 28 May 2003 17:34:42 -0400
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Date: 2003-05-28T17:34:42-04:00
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Kilgallen@SpamCop.net (Larry Kilgallen) writes:

> In article <3ED49304.8D22F012@cfmu.eurocontrol.be>, Ian Wild <ian@cfmu.eurocontrol.be> writes:
> > Larry Kilgallen wrote:
> >> 
> >>...There was absolutely no poorly-designed
> >> language commenting convention omitted from that paragraph !
> > 
> > SGML.
> > 
> > <!-- This is a comment,
> > -- but this is not.
> > -- Here's another comment...
> > -- ...and here's an unclosed quote eating the rest of your file
> >>

Could somebody please explain the above?  (I don't know SGML.)

> I stand corrected.

;-)

Here's an even worse commenting convention: the one in Unix 'make'.
A comment goes from # to end-of-line (OK so far).  I had a make file
written in GNU make, and it had something like:

    MACRO=<expand-wildcard *.ada>

or something like that, where "<expand-wildcard *.ada>" is some
GNU-make-supported thing for getting a list of files in the current
directory.  I can't remember the syntax -- some arcane incantation, no
doubt.

Anyway, once in a while, cvs puts a file in the directory called
.#mumble, so the MACRO would expand to something with a # in it, and the
rest of the macro would be "commented out".  I wasted an hour debugging
this!  And Unix doesn't help by having the "ls" command fail to display
files starting with "." (grr).

To have comment processing happen after macro expansion would be like an
Ada program that happens to read in the text "--" from a file (at run
time), and having that somehow cause the rest of the input file to be
ignored!

- Bob