Friday, May 12, 2006

[General - programming] Language features with dual behavior

Hi all,

Recently while writing some Python ane Perl code, I noticed that the features provided by the language are useful in dual roles. Perl is anyway famous for TIMTOWTDI.

Consider comments - multiline comments.

There is no dedicated multiline comment character-sequence in Perl/Python, but the common(and probably official way) is

In Perl:

Use the perl module documentation(pod) lines
E.g.
=head
... some code ...
=cut

In Python:

Use the triple-quote string
E.g.
"""
... code...
"""

Even though C/C++ provides the /* ... */ sequence, they cannot nest, so generally the
preprocessor is used to get rid of huge lines of code with

#if 0
...code...
#endif


Interesting....

[update-2/6/10]
After a short sprint with Lua, I found even Lua has a multiline string ([[ ... ]]) , similar to the triple-quote strings of Python, which can be turned into a comment with a leading --:

--[[
A multi
line

comment
]]

[update: 21-May-2015]
In bash, the null command can be used for multi-line comments!

: ' some
long boring
stuff
'

--
Ani

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