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

On 21/03/2024 07:19, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

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?
//
 

I use both - block comments when making a comment block, and line comments when adding comments to the end of a line.  That seems pretty obvious to me.
(Many IDEs will format block comments in a variety of styles according to user preference - the number of characters typed is rarely an issue.)

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
       );
 Do you feel the same?

I feel that "interspersed comments" are an abomination, and never use them.  Opinions will vary, of course.