[racket-dev] comment boxes

s-expression comments are great.  Thanks for the tip.  They are convenient.
Also, I see how making it comment-color can reduce confusion.  It's easy to
miss the #; in the midst of code and not notice it's commented out.

But I very much like the ability to view commented-out-code as code, with
coloring and indentation.

I would like the comment boxes to stay formatted.  I would find it helpful
for function templates, functions in progress (FIP), and keeping
old/multiple versions of some things in one file.

Do comment boxes need to add so much to the file size?  They seem to add a
lot of metadata.  What if they wrapped the code in something similar to #|
like #||  ?  DrRacket would not format the internals of #|   |# but would
format the innards of #||    ||#.

So formatted and unformatted comments are both important.

If the coloring were to go away, I might miss it, though it's not been
critical.  Perhaps it'd make a good option to check on or off (Colorize all
comments) or allow "render comment as code" as an option for all of or some
subset of the comment types.  Racket already has more types of commenting
than I'm used to.  Is it too much to add more?  There could be another
dimension of commenting, indicating whether to format as a comment or as
code, like #| vs #||

Do other IDEs provide options for formatting of comments?  I remember it
being annoying in the past when, after editing some commented code to keep
it consistent, I had to uncomment the code, indent it all, then recomment
it.

-Paul 




> -----Original Message-----
> From: robby.findler at gmail.com [mailto:robby.findler at gmail.com] On Behalf
> Of Robby Findler
> Sent: Saturday, June 26, 2010 9:29 AM
> To: Sam Tobin-Hochstadt
> Cc: engineer at alum.mit.edu; dev
> Subject: Re: [racket-dev] comment boxes
> 
> FWIW, I hope to make #; comments actually turn the commented out thing
> the commented out color.
> 
> Robby
> 
> On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 8:23 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at ccs.neu.edu>
> wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 9:15 AM,  <engineer at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> >> Yes, and it works well.  That's what I see as the major feature of the
> >> comment box over the comment block.  That and the colorizing.  While
> >> commented out, it still looks like code.
> >>
> >> I was afraid you were going to remove some of that functionality by not
> >> "Scheme mode"-ing them or something.
> >
> > Are there advantages of comment boxes over s-expression comments
> > (using #;) for you?
> > --
> > sam th
> > samth at ccs.neu.edu
> >