[Grace-core] Comment proposal

[Andrew P Black]

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Kim Bruce <kim at cs.pomona.edu> wrote:

>> I'm a little less excited about allowing them in the middle of complete statements, but there are some spots where I don't think it is awful:
>> 
>>    // throw away punctuation and change to lower case:
>>    thinList := myList.filter(no_punc)   // get rid of punctuation
>>                               .toLower             // & change to lower

The canonical example that I know of for end-of-line comments is something like

    def spaces = sequence.with(
        ,	"\u0020"    //	SPACE
        ,	"\u00A0"    //	NO-BREAK SPACE
        ,	"\u1680"    //	OGHAM SPACE MARK
        ,	"\u180E"    //	MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR
        ,	"\u2000"    //	EN QUAD
        ,	"\u2001"    //	EM QUAD
        ,	"\u2002"    //	EN SPACE
        ,	"\u2003"    //	EM SPACE
        ,	"\u2004"    //	THREE-PER-EM SPACE
        ,	"\u2005"    //	FOUR-PER-EM SPACE
        ,	"\u2006"    //	SIX-PER-EM SPACE
        ,	"\u2007"    //	FIGURE SPACE
        ,	"\u2008"    //	PUNCTUATION SPACE
        ,	"\u2009"    //	THIN SPACE
        ,	"\u200A"    //	HAIR SPACE
        ,	"\u200B"    //	ZERO WIDTH SPACE
        ,	"\u202F"    //	NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE
        ,	"\u205F"    //	MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE
        ,	"\u3000"    //	IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE
        ,	"\uFEFF"    //	ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE
    )

I see no reason to outlaw such comments.  The existing rule about comment attachment works just fine for this sort of thing, which is common in every language that I know of.

More generally, I don't understand the motivation for Michael's proposal.  I'm all in favor of revisiting design decisions that have, in the light of a couple of year's experience, where a feature has proved problematic.  We are doing this with inheritance–delegation–code-sharing.  I'm not aware of problems that our existing comment rules have caused.  If there are some, we should perhaps discuss these first, before proposing new restrictions.

	Andrew



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