Comment Syntax

[Thomas Davie]

On 30 Jan 2006, at 14:49, lennart at augustsson.net wrote:

> Quoting Thomas Davie <tatd2 at kent.ac.uk>:
>
>>
>> On 30 Jan 2006, at 14:28, Neil Mitchell wrote:
>>
>>>>> Another argument in favour of this is that most editors with  
>>>>> syntax
>>>>> hilighting will show --> as a comment, which again increases the
>>>>> confusion factor.
>>>>
>>>> I would rather argue that since we have editors with syntax
>>>> highlighting, this isn't a big problem. The editor will tell you  
>>>> (if
>>>> the highlighting is implemented correctly) that --> does not  
>>>> start a
>>>> comment. Rather than changing the language we should fix the
>>>> highlighting modes for the editors in question.
>>>
>>> This is rather hard, unless your editor is actually a thinly  
>>> disguised
>>> programming language. Certainly for my editor of choice (TextPad)  
>>> this
>>> cannot be done easily - and isn't needed for most other languages.
>>
>> Ditto the SubEthaEdit syntax highlighting mode - I guess most  
>> people  have got used to editors being thinly disguised operating  
>> systems  these days (not looking at emacs or vim here).
>>
>
> Are you telling me that your text editor doesn't even give you a  
> regexp
> for defining comments?  If it doesn't, I'd say your editor needs to  
> upgrade
> to some good 1960s text editor technology.

It gives you regexp and nothing more - this makes it a pain in the  
arse to input every possible character that is/isn't allowed.

Bob