[erlang-questions] Speaking of comments

[Banibrata Dutta]

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 8:45 PM, Edmond Begumisa <ebegumisa@REDACTED
> wrote:

> I've thought -- now and then, in the back of my mind -- about removing
> comments from actual source all-together (for all languages) and instead,
> putting them in companion files that the editor lines up side-by-side. More
> like annotating than just traditional commenting.
>
>
It's an interesting thought, as it removes clutter -- especially so for a
programmer who is already well versed with the code.
Most modern editors have features allowing the view to show all comments
collapsed, expanded, and some even done so selectively.


> Has this sort of thing been done before? Is there a particular editor that
> can give me this out of the box? (I admittedly haven't explored a large
> number of editors)
>
> Using Erlang as an example, I've secretly wanted something like...
>
> foo.erl
> foo.cts
>

Challenge would be to ensure 100% (fail-proof) lock-step update of the .erl
and .cts files in VCS... ideally triggered from a single command.


> Then an editor that could give me two panes while keeping the two files in
> sync...
>
> foo ->  | This function does...
>  blah  |   This part is buggy...
>  balh  |
>
> Also, in the right pane, I've wanted nestable trees with flexible levels of
> detail. Heck, why not even rich text? "FIX ME" in bold red. Take it further:
> login-name awareness, source-control/bug-tracker integration (this
> programmer said this, that programmer said that.)
>
> It seems a shame that in 2010, it's still so limiting what we can do with
> comments in our source code!
>
> - Edmond -
>
> On Thu, 09 Dec 2010 01:39:42 +1100, David Mercer <dmercer@REDACTED>
> wrote:
>
>  On Tuesday, December 07, 2010, Richard O'Keefe wrote:
>>
>>  Nesting comments are one of those clever ideas
>>> that turn out to be really dumb, because they don't actually work.
>>>
>>
>> I'll bite, mainly because I've sometimes thought nesting comments would be
>> helpful, for instance, when commenting out large blocks of code, but it is
>> rare that I get to work with a language that supports them.  Since you're
>> almost always right about such things, why do you say that they don't
>> actually work?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>>