commenting out blocks of code

[Steve Holden]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Feb 2006 19:12:01 -0500, Peter Hansen wrote:
> 
> 
>>john peter wrote:
>>
>>>is there a similar mechanism in python, other than prefixing
>>>the '#' character to the start of each statement i do  not
>>>want to execute (which gets old very quickly if one needs to
>>>comment and uncomment several statements a couple of
>>>times while "playing around with code" say during initial design)?
>>
>>In addition to the approach Paul has suggested, you should also consider 
>>using a better editor, as most decent editors should have some kind of 
>>"block comment/uncomment" feature that prevents that operation from 
>>getting old very quickly...
>>
>>Scite, for example, lets me selected a block and hit Ctrl-Q to either 
>>comment or uncomment the block.
> 
> 
> I see the developers of Scite are either newbies to GUI programming, or
> they operate in a world of their own. Ctrl-Q is reserved for Quit (or
> Exit) in every GUI API I know of.
> 
I don't think this is common enough to regard as any kind of de facto 
standard.

Just to give two further counterexamples, neither TextPad nor Notepad 
action a Ctrl/Q in that way. Perhaps I'm just using the wrong operating 
system?
> 
> 
>>(It does this by prefixing each line 
>>with #~ instead of just #, which allows it to detect when a line is 
>>already so commented and reverse the operation.)  
> 
> 
> It is *easy* to detect when a line is already commented. It starts with a
> #. The ~ is superfluous.
> 
> Commenting and uncommenting should be two different commands: the whole
> point of nested comments is that it allows you to comment a block of text
> which may already contain comments. Having one command do both commenting
> and uncommenting according to the presence or absence of semantic clues in
> the text is a recipe for failure ("No you stupid computer, I want to
> COMMENT that block, not uncomment it!!!").
> 
> Imagine if your text editor used cntl-C for both copy and paste, somehow
> guessing whether you wanted to copy selected text or paste over it
> according to some subtle clue in the text itself. Wouldn't that be fun?
> 
I agree that's a less-than-sensible feature implementation.

regards
  Steve
-- 
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