[racket-dev] Expression comments

From: Harry Spier (vasishtha.spier at gmail.com)
Date: Thu Dec 27 13:21:25 EST 2012

Dear list members,

Firstly happy holidays to everyone.

In DrRacket expression comments aren't greyed out as other comments
but maintain their syntax coloring.  I originally thought this was a
bug and submitted a bug report about a year ago, but was told this is
intended behavour.

The Style Guide says:
4.1 Comments
. . .
 Expression comments—“#;”—apply to the following S-expression. This
makes them a useful tool for debugging.  . . .  in DrRacket
S-expression comments are ignored when it comes to syntax coloring,
which makes it easy to miss them. In Emacs, the commented text is
colored like a comment and treated as text, which makes it difficult
to edit as code.

I use expression comments for debugging but find as the style guide
says that they're being syntax coloured makes it easy to miss whats
been commented out, particularly since you can do things like #;#; .

Is there any reason why there can't be either:
a) an option in DrRacket to enable or disable syntax colouring in
expression comments
or
b) #; comments out an s-expression but maintains syntax colouring
   but there is a new s-expression comment form (such as: #;; or
something else) that comments out the following s-expression but also
greys out the comment in DrRacket.

Cheers,
Harry Spier


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