roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (06/23/87)
In article <206@stc-auts.UUCP> kak@stc-auts.UUCP (Kris Kugel) writes: > I will just barely refrain from saying what I think about > a command language which uses comments as control structures. An interesting statement. In general, I have to agree with Kris. I find, for example, the commented lintisms in C (i.e. "/* NOTREACHED */") kind of ugly, but given the need for backward compatability, I'm not sure there was any other way. The lintisms and the #! shell convention have something in common; both were an attempt to add features to an existing system while maintaining compatability with previous implementations. On the other hand, take a look at something like PostScript. PS had structured comments built into the language definition from the beginning (or at least from the time I first heard about it, a few years ago). This sort of assumes that there will be 2 fundamentally different interpreters looking at your PS program. A PS printer will ignore the comments and execute the program. The spooling and page-manipulation software ignores the code and only looks at the comments. Perhaps the right way to look at it is that you have 2 distinct programs, written in two distinct languages, intermingled in the same source file. One language considers any line starting with a "%" to be a comment, the other takes the complementary view and considers comments to be any line NOT starting with a "%". -- Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016