Fw: Recording what we decided *not* to do, and why

[forwarded from the general language list]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Glenn Linderman" <Glenn@Linderman.com>
To: "Larry Wall" <larry@wall.org>
Cc: "John Porter" <jdporter@min.net>; <perl6-language@perl.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2000 9:44 PM
Subject: Re: Recording what we decided *not* to do, and why


> Larry Wall wrote:
>
> > A less obvious strategy is to try to see where various marginal
> > features could be subsumed under some more powerful feature.
>
> In general, this is a good^Wgreat concept to avoid multitudinous small
features.
>
> > To some extent,
>
> I'm glad you qualified this...
>
> > you see this with the ability to use pod for multiline
> > comments.
>
> There's a certain relationship between documentation via pod and
documentation
> via comments.   If pod and comments could be totally unified, this might
be a
> good idea.  But they already have separate syntaxes: so unifying them
would
> require changes to one or both.  Without total unification and uniform
syntax
> for both, I think it better to leave comments and pod as separate
features:
> documentation for publication is often at a different level, and better
not
> mixed with internals documentation anyway: the different syntaxes for
code, pod,
> and comments helps the author keep them visually separate.
>
> > For embedded comments, we might rather see some kind of
> > macro facility that could turn qc// or any other quoted form into a
> > list of zero or more tokens.
>
> There's a number of us that have been arguing about that topic.  We wish
the
> -mlc list would become responsive.  While a function style or quoted form
> comment might seem clever, and even Perlish due to its syntax, it doesn't
help
> the author of the code/comments readily distinguish them.  What good are
> comments if you can't find them when you need them?
>
> > Larry
>
> --
> Glenn
> =====
> There  are two kinds of people, those
> who finish  what they start,  and  so
> on...                 -- Robert Byrne
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Why pay for something you could get for free?
> NetZero provides FREE Internet Access and Email
> http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html
>

• Fw: Recording what we decided *not* to do, and why by Michael Mathews
• Fw: Recording what we decided *not* to do, and why by Michael Mathews