On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 07:00:29PM -0700, Jonathan Lang wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> > Jonathan wrote:
> > > If a delimiter is included, the
> > > comment is terminated by the matching quote delimiter; if absent, the
> > > comment is terminated by the next dot.
> >
> > But if one is going to go this route (and I'm not sure that we should),
> > then when the delimiter is absent have the comment terminate at
> > the first non-whitespace character.
>
> ...which makes "#.\s" good only for inserting whitespace where it
> normally wouldn't belong.
Well, even if we say terminate at the next dot, that's saying
that our inserted comments cannot contain dots in them.
But if we want to terminate at another dot, perhaps we should
explicitly specify an extra dot as the delimiter. We still get
some nice symmetries this way:
$x#.. ..foo()
$x#.. ..()
$x#.. this is a delimited comment ..()
$x#.[ this is also a delimited comment ].()
Thus "#.\s" just happens to mean that we're using whitespace
(or actually, the end of whitespace) as a delimiter.
Somehow I have the nagging feeling that Larry will once again
take these ideas and come up with something totally unexpected
and simultaneously awesome, as he often does. (At least, I hope
that's the case.)
Pm
