John Porter wrote:
>
> Michael Mathews wrote:
> > Using a two-character syntax to start and end a multiline comment seems to
> > be a good way to satisfy both the desired similarity to "#" and the desired
> > uniqueness to avoid collision with real single-line quotes. I would suggest
> > a (# many lines of comment #) syntax:
> >
> Nothing personal, but -- Barf. Very non-perlish, IMHO.
>
> qc( here's some text which will evaluate to "silent undef". );
>
I had much the same reaction to (# foo #). I would find qc( foo ) much
more
acceptable. We lose the "comments are always #" idea, but then there's
other languages that have more than one character design used for
comments.
In the case of C/C++, # would map to //, and qc() would map to /* */.
You can use either to simulate the other, but each has one or two things
that it handles better than the other.
On the other hand, the stated desire for this is for commenting out
blocks of code. That might be more achievable with (I forget the right
name for this) 'compile time directives' such as "#if", "#endif". We'd
have to use a different opening syntax, since # is already taken for
comments, but this might be of more general usefulnes than block
comments.
[I have a sneaking suspicion that this is another one of those 'hot
topics'. I suspect that we could abuse pod to achieve the block comment
effect, but that would clutter up the documentation rather badly.]
E.W.
