From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id KAA10958; Fri, 12 Oct 2001 10:49:43 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id KAA11037 for ; Fri, 12 Oct 2001 10:49:42 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from morgon.inria.fr (morgon.inria.fr [128.93.8.33]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f9C8nej13567; Fri, 12 Oct 2001 10:49:40 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from remy@localhost) by morgon.inria.fr (8.9.3/8.9.3) id KAA31060; Fri, 12 Oct 2001 10:57:26 +0200 Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 10:57:26 +0200 From: Didier Remy To: Xavier Leroy Cc: bcpierce@cis.upenn.edu, caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Re: [Caml-announce] OCamldoc Message-ID: <20011012105724.A31047@morgon.inria.fr> Reply-To: Didier.Remy@inria.fr References: <8E31D6933A2FE64F8AE3CC1381EEDCE7140166@NT.kal.com> <4066.1002712085@saul.cis.upenn.edu> <20011011213211.B1047@pauillac.inria.fr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre3us In-Reply-To: <20011011213211.B1047@pauillac.inria.fr> Organization: INRIA, BP 105, F-78153 Le Chesnay Cedex Phone: (33) 1 3963 5317 -- Sec: (33) 1 3963 5570 -- Fax: (33) 1 3963 5684 Web: http://cristal.inria.fr/~remy Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk My own little comment on comments... I also wish that the syntax of documentation should remain simple to understand and visually light, so that the commented code can be read and writen, directly! without yet another tool... However, I am worried if this were to rely on indentation. I think that this is a heavy contraint put on programmers (every one has his own style). Moreover, this will force all automatic indentation tools (e.g. the emacs-mode etc.) to understand the meaning of indentation *perfectly* so as not to break them. This makes these tools very fragile. Note that today, these tools only change the presentation, and at worse, there produce a bad taste indentation but never *loose* information. Also, I was taught to believe that relying on white space/tabulations/blanks for the meaning was awful backward technology (see the \t in Makefiles...). Why should this not apply to the ``semantics of comments''? Overall, I find Jérome's suggestion to use (** aaa *) and (* aaa **) to indicate placement visually light while it seems to providing *all* the flexibility that people are calling for: placement should either be before or after the element, but explicit. Didier ------------------- Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr