Original languages were line oriented, newer languages were block oriented. Original languages has line comments. Newer languages had block comments, and had line comments added back in. So I would read that as line comments being more fundamental, but people who used line comments got so sick of them that they thought block comments would be a good idea. (david) <MartinRinehart@gmail.com> wrote in message news:1dd387df-d4c8-495d-8d58-695033cbfffc@e6g2000prf.googlegroups.com... > I've designed a language, Decaf, for beginners. I've got block > comments but not multi-line strings. > > If you can only have one or the other, which is more helpful? > > Should I have both? (Make a strong argument here: my design principal > is, "Designed by a backpacker: when in doubt, leave it out.")

<MartinRinehart@gmail.com> wrote: >I've designed a language, Decaf, for beginners. I've got block >comments but not multi-line strings. > >If you can only have one or the other, which is more helpful? Given a one-or-the-other choice, any editor worth using can do "comment/uncomment region", and if only to-EOL comments are available, it will do that for you instead of using block comments. So block comments are not really a useful language feature. Unless you're expecting your beginners to grind out their code in Notepad. On the other hand, they are completely orthogonal features. Multi-line strings in Python are not comments, and treating them as such is as misguided as using raw strings for Windows filenames. What would you have to say about a language which had no specialised comment syntax whatsoever, and expected you to use semantically irrelevent string literals? -- \S -- siona@chiark.greenend.org.uk -- http://www.chaos.org.uk/~sion/ "Frankly I have no feelings towards penguins one way or the other" -- Arthur C. Clarke her nu becomeþ se bera eadward ofdun hlæddre heafdes bæce bump bump bump

On 2007-12-19, Paul McGuire <ptmcg@austin.rr.com> wrote: > On Dec 19, 10:48 am, MartinRineh...@gmail.com wrote: >> This morning block comments disappeared from the Decaf design. >> Maybe later today they'll be instantiated in the tokenizer. > > Out of the idlest of curiousity, does this language have a BNF, > or some other form of grammar definition? Might I suggest: laughs evilly, rubbing hands together? -- Neil Cerutti