Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to open discussion on the adequacy and design of commenting techniques in programming (and, indeed, all computer processing) languages. The argument is made that the common notion of comment statements is too simplistics, and that a powerful alternative exists. A distinction is made between simple comment statements and scoped comments. Two types of scoped comments are mentioned, and their weaknesses are considered. The paper ends with a call for language designers to address this issue.
Index Terms
- Programming languages should NOT have comment statements
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