[sc34wg3] Multi-line comments in CTM

[Steve Pepper]

* Patrick
|
| So, I guess my question is whether or not a multi-line comment mechanism
| is thought to be necessary for commenting out blocks of material in a
| CTM instance?

I have created literally dozens and dozens of topic maps in LTM over the last 8
years, and I have had a use for multi-line comments in practically every one.
Typical use cases for me are:

* lengthy, "permanent" comments, such as the header information and
  "todo" lists (see opera.ltm, distributed with the Omnigator, for
  examples)

* temporarily commenting out large chunks of LTM code (e.g. all
  associations of a certain type) for testing purposes

* temporarily commenting out large chunks of non-LTM data (e.g.
  source data pasted in from a CSV file and intended to be converted
  to LTM using search/replace at a later date).

Depending on which editor one has available, it can be MUCH more inconvenient to
prefix every line with a (single line) comment character than to wrap a large
number of lines with (multi-line) start and end delimiters.

Multi-line comments are therefore an absolute must for me.

Should it be possible to nest them? Once in a while I've wished this was
possible with LTM, but it isn't and I've survived without it. I've also survived
without the ability to escape closing delimiters in quotes. In short: the
simplest possible multi-line comment capability would meet my requirements, but
I agree with Lars Marius that nested comments would be the better solution (even
though they screw up the syntax colouring in my editor ;-)

* Murray
|
| Please, stick with the known when possible. Avoid the strange.

I agree with this and would have liked to see C/Java/CSS style comments.
Unfortunately, though, the slash is an important path operator syntax in TMQL.
If TMQL and CTM are to have the same comment syntax (which I think they should),
this is a showstopper for // (single line) and /* ... */ (multi-line).

One of the few symbols that TMQL hasn't used is the bang, which is why the Kyoto
meeting agreed on !! (single line) and !* ... *! (multi-line).

* Robert
|
| This discussion is so very 1980. :-)

This kind of comment is so very unnecessary :-(

Steve
 
--
Conference Chair, Topic Maps 2008
Oslo, April 2-4 2008
www.topicmaps.com