Re: Block Comments Or Rest-Of-Line Comments?

On 2024-03-21 06:19:13 +0000, Lawrence D'Oliveiro said:

The original comment delimiters in C were copied from PL/I: everything
between “/*” and “*/” is a comment, even extending across multiple lines.
Pascal had something similar, only the delimiters were “{” and “}”, or
“(*” and “*)” for compatibility with machines with restricted character
sets.
 For some reason, the Ada folks decided block comments were not a good
idea, and so their rule was that anything after “--” up to the end of the
line was a comment. And C++ adopted a similar rule, using “//” as their
to-end-of-line comment marker, though of course they also kept C-style
block comments. Java also keeps both these styles.
 Since then, I’ve seen newer programmers gravitate towards the rest-of-line
form in preference to the block form, and I’m not sure why. I’m fond of
writing things like
 /*
    A very simple HTML/XML entity-escape function--why isn’t this
    part of the standard Java API?
*/
 which involve less typing than
 //
//  A very simple HTML/XML entity-escape function--why isn’t this
//  part of the standard Java API?
//

But not less than
//  A very simple HTML/XML entity-escape function--why isn’t this
//  part of the standard Java API?
as the empty lines do not need any comment marks.

Also, the “block” form allows “interspersed” comments, where a short
comment can be put in the middle of a line and followed by more program
text in the rest of the line. For example, as a way of keeping long
argument lists straight:
     gdImageCopyResampled
      (
        /*dst =*/ ResizedFrame,
        /*src =*/ Context.StillFrame,
        /*dstX =*/ 0,
        /*dstY =*/ 0,
        /*srcX =*/ 0,
        /*srcY =*/ 0,
        /*dstW =*/ ResizedFrame->sx,
        /*dstH =*/ ResizedFrame->sy,
        /*srcW =*/ Context.StillFrame->sx,
        /*srcH =*/ Context.StillFrame->sy
      );

I prefer to put the argument names at the end of the line.

Do you feel the same?

No, I use both kind of comments with languages that permit both.
--
Mikko