[Python-Dev] PEP 350: Codetags

[Steve Holden]

Terry Hancock wrote:
> On Monday 26 September 2005 05:35 pm, Micah Elliott wrote:
> 
>>Please read/comment/vote.  This circulated as a pre-PEP proposal
>>submitted to c.l.py on August 10, but has changed quite a bit since
>>then.  I'm reposting this since it is now "Open (under consideration)"
>>at <http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0350.html>.
> 
> 
> Overall, it looks good, but my objection would be:
> 
> 
>>:Objection: I aesthetically dislike for the comment to be terminated
>>    with <> in the empty field case.
>>
>>:Defense: It is necessary to have a terminator since codetags may be
>>    followed by non-codetag comments.  Or codetags could be limited to
>>    a single line, but that's prohibitive.  I can't think of any
>>    single-character terminator that is appropriate and significantly
>>    better than <>.  Maybe ``@`` could be a terminator, but then most
>>    codetags will have an unnecessary @.
> 
> 
> The <> terminator is evil.  People will hate that. If there are no fields,
> you should just be able to leave it off. This will have an additional
> advantage in that many will already have compliant codetags if you leave
> off this requirement.
> 
> You worry over the need to detect the end of the block, but wouldn't '\n\n'
> be a much more natural delimiter?  I.e.:
> 
> # TODO: This is a multi-line todo tag.
> #       You see how I've gone to the next line.
> 
> # This, on the other hand is an unrelated comment. You can tell it's not
> # related, because there is an intervening blank line.  I think people
> # do this naturally when writing comments (I know I do -- I'm fairly
> # certain I've seen other people do it).
> #
> # Whereas, as you can see, a mere paragraph break can be represented by
> # a blank comment line.
> #
> # Whitespace formatting, after all, is VERY PYTHONIC. ;-)
> # Delimiters on the other hand -- well, we prefer not to mention
> # the sort of languages that use those, right? ;-)
> 
+1

> Another possibility is to recognize lines like:
> 
> #---------------------------------------
> #***************************************
> #=======================================
> 
> I.e. a comment mark followed by a line composed of repeating characters
> as an alternative separator. These are also pretty in pretty common
> use.
> 
-0

regards
  Steve
-- 
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