Moritz Lenz <mor...@faui2k3.org> writes: > In all other cases of quote like constructs are the semantics are > explicit first (think of Q, qx, m, <, «), the delimiter comes later. > Changing that all of a sudden seems very unintuitive and wrong.
Thing is, comments are not quote-like. All of the quote-like constructs are expressions. Comments are not. Different things should be different, and comments should not look like expressions. Or so it seems to me, at least. Rambling along ... In C++, all comments start with the same character, but it is the end-of-line comments that start off with it doubled up. And so C++ avoids these gotchas. Alternatively, if end-of-line comments required whitespace (or some other non-bracket non-# character class) after one or more # characters, it would not just resolve the gotchas: It would make the comments far easier to read as well. Meanwhile, a # sequence followed by neither whitespace nor brackets would be a syntax error, and I imagine that might make it hard to sell. Too late for Perl to go that way though. (Right? Yeah, right.) The only other way for Perl to avoid these gotchas and still retain the two kinds of comments seems to be if the two constructs start with different characters. Putting the delimiter first is one way of doing it. Reserving one more comment leading character would be another. Seems expensive though. :-\ So, are the more ways to design it with a different leading character? :#( ... ) has been suggested, and it is begginning to grow on me. :# ... #: could work, I suppose (it is not a quote-like expression, so doesn't need to look like it is) – but since the closer there starts with a #, I imagine that might run into similar trouble. An unspace-like \#( ... ) could perhaps work? ... though I get the feeling someone else has rambled along these lines before ... Eirik -- Ceci n'est pas une .sig.
