[vwnc] Lets have nestable comments (/* */)

Heh, indeed, not confusing at all,

http://www.getdropbox.com/gallery/6265/1/vwnc?h=bd5d4a

-Boris

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On
Behalf """"""""
> character"""""
>
> Any questions? :-)
>
> David Buck
>
> Dennis Smith wrote:
>
> Why add syntax?  Why not just use "..." -- but provide functions
to the
> existing syntax,
> could we use "{ as the opening comment marker
and }" as
> the closing
> comment marker?  I really hate double quoting
double
> quotes within
> comments.  This syntax would be reasonably
compatible
> with the
> Smalltalk syntax (it doesn't look like a binary
> operator) but still
> provides the nesting.  Additionally, you can
double shortcuts to
> comment/uncomment the
> selection? When commenting a block that
already
> contains comments, the
> comment quotes could be automatically
doubled.
>
> /* is also now a legal binary selector,
I think.
>
> Steve
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [hidden email]
[mailto:vwnc-
> [hidden email]] On
> Behalf Of Terry Raymond
> Sent: 29 July 2008 15:32
> To: VWNC
> Subject: [vwnc] Lets have
nestable comments
> (/* */)
>
> Maybe it is just me but I would
like to be
> able to comment
> out a group of lines without
having to
> double quote enclosed
> quotes. I think it would be nice
to have
> something like
> /* and */ and make them
nestable. <http://www.craftedsmalltalk.com> _______________________________________________
> vwnc mailing list
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>
>
>
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Eliot Miranda wrote:
> Gilad Bracha's Newspeak uses (* ... *).  As others have pointed out C
> comments don't nest, and {}'s are reserved for things like tuples and
> qualified references.  // is also not on because it is an operator and
> Smalltalk does not have line-oriented syntax  (e.g. foo // <CR> bar is
> foo // bar).  So how about (* ... *) ?

(* and *) are better than any other suggestions I've seen on this
thread. //, /*, and */ are all valid binary selectors, and so can appear
in existing Smalltalk code. (* and *) are not valid binary selectors,
and a parenthesized expression cannot start or end with a binary
selector, so this works.

Historical note: The first nestable comment feature in any Smalltalk
(that I'm aware of) was in Smalltalk Agents for Macintosh, which used “
and ” for nestable comments. (If those non-ASCII characters don't come
through for all mail readers, they're the opening and closing curly
quote characters.) I found this quite elegant, and would recommend using
it if we were willing to break out of the ASCII world for our syntax,
but I suppose that's not something we want to do.

Regards,

-Martin
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Dennis Smith escreveu:
+1

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On 30/07/2008, at 2:54 AM, Eliot Miranda wrote:

> Gilad Bracha's Newspeak uses (* ... *).  As others have pointed out  
> C comments don't nest, and {}'s are reserved for things like tuples  
> and qualified references.  // is also not on because it is an  
> operator and Smalltalk does not have line-oriented syntax  (e.g.  
> foo // <CR> bar is foo // bar).  So how about (* ... *) ?

Any form of nestable comment would need a reversible escaping  
mechanism to be automatically applicable.

e.g. if I comment out the following code:

   aStream nextPutAll: '*)'.

what should happen?

That's the beauty of // -> eol as a comment mechanism.

Antony Blakey
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Ph: 0438 840 787

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.
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On 30/07/2008, at 12:53 AM, Terry Raymond wrote:

> Commenting out code works quite well for changes that you are unsure
> about and may want to back out.
>
> You may also want to comment out code, rather than remove it, as a
> way of keeping a change history.

Neither of which would be relevant with a decent version control system.

Antony Blakey
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from repression.
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Slip over to that 'other' commercial Smalltalk ( VAST ) and try their very nice and easy to use commenting/uncommenting
feature.

 From memory you selected an area, and clicked the comment button, as you browsed around your code if you entered
a commented area the comment button became a uncomment button.
I think it used " as the brace.

 I selected vwst for Linux work, but did miss this nice feature.

This thread illustrates the VERY SMALL items that if fixed would make vwst a much better product. Perhaps the internals
of vwst are just as messy as other tar ball products !!

On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:09:38 -0400
"Terry Raymond" <[hidden email]> wrote:


--
Cheers,
Brett
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Antony Blakey wrote:

On 30/07/2008, at 12:53 AM, Terry Raymond wrote:

  

Commenting out code works quite well for changes that you are unsure
about and may want to back out.

You may also want to comment out code, rather than remove it, as a
way of keeping a change history.
    

Neither of which would be relevant with a decent version control system.
  

I disagree -- I often comment out code or even keep previous versions of methods (I add X to the end)
as a reminder of particular change that might want more looking at if I am debugging in that area.

Eventually I remove the commented code, but it is really helpful to see it there for a while, and being
able to look at previous versions would not help as I would not be reminded to do so.

Antony Blakey
-------------
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Ph: 0438 840 787

He who would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy  
from repression.
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brett wrote:

Slip over to that 'other' commercial Smalltalk ( VAST ) and try their very nice and easy to use commenting/uncommenting
feature.

 From memory you selected an area, and clicked the comment button, as you browsed around your code if you entered
a commented area the comment button became a uncomment button.
I think it used " as the brace.

 I selected vwst for Linux work, but did miss this nice feature.
  

VW does have this, its just not nestable.
in VW, select some characters and press -- Escape + "
that will add the comments.
Select the quoted string (inside the quotes) and press -- Escape + "
and it removes the comments.

This thread illustrates the VERY SMALL items that if fixed would make vwst a much better product. Perhaps the internals
of vwst are just as messy as other tar ball products !!

On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:09:38 -0400
"Terry Raymond" [hidden email] wrote:

  

I don't care what syntax is used. However, if a command
is used to comment and properly double quote then we also
need double clicking to highlight the entire comment and
not just up to the next double quote.

Terry
 
===========================================================
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-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Travis Griggs
Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2008 12:32 PM
To: VWNC List
Subject: Re: [vwnc] Lets have nestable comments (/* */)

On Jul 29, 2008, at 7:19 AM, Steven Kelly wrote:

      

-1

Why not just have menu or keyboard shortcuts to comment/uncomment the
selection? When commenting a block that already contains comments, the
comment quotes could be automatically doubled.
        

+1, to Steven's idea. I was going to propose that that is the proper
solution, but he beat me to it :)

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Well, I suppose if we had method versions like Envy then
it would not matter so much. But, I don't believe every
edit necessitates its own version.

Terry
 
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Dennis Smith wrote:

brett wrote:

Slip over to that 'other' commercial Smalltalk ( VAST ) and try their very nice and easy to use commenting/uncommenting
feature.

 From memory you selected an area, and clicked the comment button, as you browsed around your code if you entered
a commented area the comment button became a uncomment button.
I think it used " as the brace.

 I selected vwst for Linux work, but did miss this nice feature.
  

VW does have this, its just not nestable.
in VW, select some characters and press -- Escape + "
that will add the comments.
Select the quoted string (inside the quotes) and press -- Escape + "
and it removes the comments.

But it doesn't properly quote internal quotes.

   'Say "Hello" to everyone'

changes to
   "'Say "Hello" to everyone'"

but the Hello part is now not part of a comment.

David Buck


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David Buck wrote:

Dennis Smith wrote:

brett wrote:

Slip over to that 'other' commercial Smalltalk ( VAST ) and try their very nice and easy to use commenting/uncommenting
feature.

 From memory you selected an area, and clicked the comment button, as you browsed around your code if you entered
a commented area the comment button became a uncomment button.
I think it used " as the brace.

 I selected vwst for Linux work, but did miss this nice feature.
  

VW does have this, its just not nestable.
in VW, select some characters and press -- Escape + "
that will add the comments.
Select the quoted string (inside the quotes) and press -- Escape + "
and it removes the comments.

But it doesn't properly quote internal quotes.

   'Say "Hello" to everyone'

changes to
   "'Say "Hello" to everyone'"

but the Hello part is now not part of a comment.

Yes, VA does handle nesting -- seems that '"'  (thats single+double+single) is an escaped
commenting quote (i.e. its ignored).  So if you "comment" something like
    abc "def" xyz
you get
    "abc '"' def '"' xyz"
then you can uncomment it and get back the original.

So if VA does it that way, why not adopt that??

Would it break any current comments? possibly but I doubt there
would be many.

David Buck

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On Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:44:16 -0400
"Terry Raymond" <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Well, I suppose if we had method versions like Envy then
> it would not matter so much. But, I don't believe every
> edit necessitates its own version.

I have a menu item in the "Method" menu of the RB called "Browse method
changes", which does this. It's probably from the parcel
"Method-History" distributed with VW.

Frankly, I personally don't get this hubbub about complexifying the
system. It's never been an issue for me.

s.
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On 29-Jul-08, at 3:02 PM, Martin McClure wrote:

> (* and *) are better than any other suggestions I've seen on this
> thread. //, /*, and */ are all valid binary selectors, and so can  
> appear
> in existing Smalltalk code. (* and *) are not valid binary selectors,
> and a parenthesized expression cannot start or end with a binary
> selector, so this works.

I think "{ and }" was also a good suggestion. (Note that this is NOT  
just braces. A comment would start with quote-left-brace and end with  
right-brace-q uote.) It doesn't conflict with anything either, and It  
has the advantage of being compatible with traditional Smalltalk  
comments, when not nested.

Colin
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Why add complexity to the syntax when VA has already
done it using " characters by quoting the internal ones in
single quotes?  No added syntax, a bit of semantic change,
and some compatibility among vendors??

Colin Putney wrote:

On 29-Jul-08, at 3:02 PM, Martin McClure wrote:

  

(* and *) are better than any other suggestions I've seen on this
thread. //, /*, and */ are all valid binary selectors, and so can  
appear
in existing Smalltalk code. (* and *) are not valid binary selectors,
and a parenthesized expression cannot start or end with a binary
selector, so this works.
    

I think "{ and }" was also a good suggestion. (Note that this is NOT  
just braces. A comment would start with quote-left-brace and end with  
right-brace-q	uote.) It doesn't conflict with anything either, and It  
has the advantage of being compatible with traditional Smalltalk  
comments, when not nested.

Colin
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I wrote:
>> I think "{ and }" was also a good suggestion.
On 30-Jul-08, at 7:38 PM, Dennis Smith wrote:

> Why add complexity to the syntax when VA has already
> done it using " characters by quoting the internal ones in
> single quotes?  No added syntax, a bit of semantic change,
> and some compatibility among vendors??

The advantage of "{ }" or (* *) is that the opening a comment is  
distinct from closing a comment. This allows the compiler to support  
nested comments without escaping. If you don't mind escaping nested  
comments, what reason do you have for preferring single-double-single  
as the escape sequence over double-double?

Colin
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On Jul 31, 2008, at 5:58 PM, Colin Putney wrote:


I like the simplicity of comments currently. I just have to quote  
something. A very natural language type of thing to do. It's a single  
shift-char sequence. All of these suggestions, while they solve a  
problem I encounter now and then again, do so at the expense of ease  
of use for the very common documentation case. I have to do a two-
shift-char sequence and differentiate between lead and end.

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"An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will  
explain itself." - Charles Dickens

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I would say that the current tools are pritty good. The only small thing I could say about comments is that I would like a comment which starts on a new line to stay on a new line and a comment which starts after a statement to stay at that line after formatting the text.
Having said I haven't checked out if there is an option to do so (I don't like options).

Antoher small thing is that I keeping on hitting Ctrl+F to find text which is now so comm<a href="http://webmail1a.orange.fr/webmail/fr_FR/write.html" onclick="javascript:Write_Valid();return false">document.write (BT_SUBMIT);on everywhere ( can't we use the function button for these things ?).

Antoher very very small thing would be that the formats of the builder in resource files are different from the normal source formatting. Making them similar would allows for easier hacking around.

For all the rest I am happy to wait for a TextEditorTOO with nice alpha blending error messages and backgrounds comments.


@+Maarten,
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Travis Griggs wrote:

On Jul 31, 2008, at 5:58 PM, Colin Putney wrote:

  

I wrote:
    

I think "{ and }" was also a good suggestion.
        

On 30-Jul-08, at 7:38 PM, Dennis Smith wrote:

    

Why add complexity to the syntax when VA has already
done it using " characters by quoting the internal ones in
single quotes?  No added syntax, a bit of semantic change,
and some compatibility among vendors??
      

The advantage of "{ }" or (* *) is that the opening a comment is
distinct from closing a comment. This allows the compiler to support
nested comments without escaping. If you don't mind escaping nested
comments, what reason do you have for preferring single-double-single
as the escape sequence over double-double?
    

I like the simplicity of comments currently. I just have to quote  
something. A very natural language type of thing to do. It's a single  
shift-char sequence. All of these suggestions, while they solve a  
problem I encounter now and then again, do so at the expense of ease  
of use for the very common documentation case. I have to do a two- 
shift-char sequence and differentiate between lead and end.

--
Travis Griggs
Objologist
"An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will  
explain itself." - Charles Dickens

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With "{ and }", you can still use simple double quotes to comment things.  It doesn't take away that facility.  The "{ form would allow you to comment out large sections without having to double the double quotes inside.  I would expect it to be used much more rarely and only for commenting out sections of code that still have comments.

David Buck


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Colin Putney wrote:

I wrote:
  

I think "{ and }" was also a good suggestion.
      

On 30-Jul-08, at 7:38 PM, Dennis Smith wrote:

  

Why add complexity to the syntax when VA has already
done it using " characters by quoting the internal ones in
single quotes?  No added syntax, a bit of semantic change,
and some compatibility among vendors??
    

The advantage of "{ }" or (* *) is that the opening a comment is  
distinct from closing a comment. This allows the compiler to support  
nested comments without escaping. If you don't mind escaping nested  
comments, what reason do you have for preferring single-double-single  
as the escape sequence over double-double?
  

Compatibility with a large existing Smalltalk that already does it.

Colin
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