On Monday, 12 January 2015 at 00:38:20 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 1/11/15 10:48 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
The main problem is what to do about comments, which don't
fit into the
grammar.
In the first version comments might go through unchanged.
Consider:
for /*comment*/ (a;
b;
c)
Do what with that?
I don't know. Simplest would be to punt for now - such rare
embedded comments
should not be blockers. -- Andrei
Normally I would agree, but deleting peoples' comments from
their source code is not a good plan. It'll make them
justifiably angry.
This conversation reminds me of something I've thought about ever
since I first studied D. D takes the C preprocessor and folds it
into the regular AST. But comments still seemed like the outlier.
I looked through a bunch of source code and tried to figure out
the most specific place anyone could possibly put a comment. The
most detailed I found were something like:
enum X {
ONE,
TWO, // We need a TWO here
THREE
}
So I started conceiving of a language in which even the
*comments* were part of the AST. For, me this would be the
aesthetic ideal. It just seemed like the next step in total AST
integration.
