Duncan Booth wrote: > Want to comment out a block of code in C++? The only (nearly) reliable way > is to insert single-line comments down the block. You can't use a block > comment if there are any other block comments inside the code you want to > block out.
As Roel said, #if 0 is the standard way. It abuses the preprocessor and doesn't show up in syntax highlighting, but other than that works very well. Honestly though, /* and */ should have nested properly since day 1. Adding it wouldn't even break existing code. > The danger of block comments is that if you forget to close the comment > you can accidentally comment out a large part of your code. No, unclosed comments should raise a syntax error. Would you accept an unclosed string literal? > Doc strings will usually work as an alternative, especially since you > have a choice of two flavours of triple quoted strings, so if you use > one for docstrings the other is always free for your temporary block > comments. That's a fair point, if a bit of a kludge. 90% there is good enough in practice. > This pig gets much more annoyed having to maintain code which has large > chunks of unneeded commented out code left over from some other programmer, > or which has completely messed up indentation. Sure they can be abused. So can a thousand other language features. My point is you can't teach good coding through syntax, and trying to causes more problems than it solves. I would argue the current system is in fact slightly worse, because people will comment out code chunks anyway (either lots of #s or triple-quotes) and are less likely to remove them when it's more work. But either way, social pressure is infinitely more effective at cleaning up code than comment syntax. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
