[r6rs-discuss] [Formal] #;<datum> comments useless

From: Anton van Straaten <anton>
Date: Sat Sep 30 14:33:22 2006

#;(Posting as an individual member of the Scheme community)

Per Bothner wrote:
> But since you should always use a smart editor, this point is moot.

If you're using a smart editor, then it should be very clear which
expressions have been commented out with #;.

Also, the objection that #; makes it harder to see where the comment
ends applies equally to the Lisp/Scheme abbreviation for QUOTE, but this
doesn't seem to be a problem in practice -- in fact, that abbreviation
is one of the more useful syntactic features of Lisp & Scheme.

So the alleged danger of this feature seems overstated. It seems much
closer to harmless than harmful to me.

The remaining objections seem to boil down to the fact that it's not an
essential feature. That's true. Neither is the abbreviation for QUOTE.
  But #; has been considered useful enough that multiple Schemes
implement it. One minor argument for specifying it in R6RS is that it
should reduce the temptation for other implementations to use an
alternative character sequence for expression comments (we all know what
mavericks the Scheme implementors are...)

Other than that, I haven't seen anything in this thread to make me think
that Scheme users should, as Aziz put it, "be denied using a handy and
useful facility" because some people don't see a need for it.

Anton
Received on Sat Sep 30 2006 - 14:33:07 UTC