On 8 May 2012, at 20:02, Alessio Stalla wrote: > On topic: the proposed syntactic addition is nice, but imho too > trivial and too easily provided as a library to bother with a CDR > (that would need to be included in each implementation).
Interesting discussion so far. (Alessio, I'm not responding to you directly, just as a stub for the discussion, so to speak… ;) I can perfectly understand those who voiced their opinion that the existing mechanisms for commenting out s-expressions are good enough. (I especially liked the #+| here is a bug | variant that puts a comment in the feature expression.) However, the suggestion that #; could just be put in a library is not a valid counter argument. The main reason for adding #; to a specification (and thus suggesting it as a quasi-standard for the language) is that it should be straightforward and simple to use it. Adding #; in any way makes only sense if it can be used in a considerably faster way than any other of the existing options. If I want to comment out an s-expression, I probably want to do this during development because I quickly want to try out a variant of my code. I don't want to be interrupted in my flow of thinking about the problem at hand when doing so. That's the very reason why I never use the #+(and) and #-(or) options, because they require me to think at least for a few seconds which way the operators go, and that disrupts what I'm actually interested in [1]. Likewise, I think, with the other options. I already find that placing a pair of #| |# around the s-expression in question takes far too much time than necessary. I haven't decided yet whether I should go forward with the CDR or not... Pascal [1] They are intentionally chosen wrong in this sentence, and if you missed that, it proves my point. -- Pascal Costanza The views expressed in this email are my own, and not those of my employer. _______________________________________________ pro mailing list [email protected] http://lists.common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pro
