[Grace-core] Comments (was Re: Putative Blog Posts)

[Michael Kölling]

On 4 Nov 2010, at 19:21, James Noble wrote:

> yep. and even with IDEs we still need a textual syntax that one can cut & paste
> (and - great idea from Jan VItek - the "package syntax" - like Jars - should just be source code :-)
> that is we follow javascript not java - web services, loadable beans, just send the source.
> So if we want comments preseved in that form, we need a syntax in the input language
> (because they are one and the same)

One related sensitive issue here is versioning. One of the main reasons that Java is building up so much cruft is the decision never to break existing code.

Grace will undoubtedly have to go through changes after release. If we want Grace to remain clean, we need a way to *remove* stuff (that is to say: make ild stuff break). If packages are source, this may happen more easily.

(Then again, for a teaching language we might not care so much.)

Michael