[ruby-dev:46893] [ruby-trunk - Feature #7639] More freedom for location of comments

["duerst (Martin Dürst)" <duerst@it•aoyama.ac.jp>]

Issue #7639 has been updated by duerst (Martin Dürst).

Assignee set to matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)

sawa (Tsuyoshi Sawada) wrote:
> duerst: 

(please call me Martin)

I agree that bad comments (too long, unrelated to what's going on,...) are bad, and we should not be too concerned with that. However, that is not my main point.

My main point is that currently in Ruby, I can look at the end of a line or at the start of the next line to know whether a statement/expression continues on the next line. If we allow comment lines before lines starting with a dot, this is no longer the case. I have to read past the comment to find the next non-comment line to know whether the statement is continued or not.

Currently, in 100%, I know that I don't have to look past a comment to check for a line starting with a dot. If we introduce this proposal, there will still be about 99% of case where the statement does not continue after the comment, and therefore most people may easily miss a continuation after a comment. That's the problem I see with this proposal, and that problem does not go away even if all comments are good ones.

Looking at your proposal again, it seems to me that you are saying that this is an inconsistency for people who *write* the code. But I think it is because we want it to be easy for people to read the code (without having to look ahead past comments to check for continuations).

I have assigned this to Matz, because he has the most ability and experience to jugde this kind of writability/readability issue.
----------------------------------------
Feature #7639: More freedom for location of comments
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7639#change-35628

Author: sawa (Tsuyoshi Sawada)
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Category: core
Target version: Next Major


When we chain methods with the period at the end of each line, we can put comments in between the lines:

    [1, 2, 3].
    # First, we do blah blah
    method1.
    # Second, we do blah blah
    method2.
    =begin
      Third, the following line
      does this
      and that ...
    =end
    method3

but when we have the period at the beginning of the line, putting comments in similar positions returns an error:

    [1, 2, 3]
    # First, we do blah blah
    .method1
    # Second, we do blah blah
    .method2
    =begin
      Third, the following line
      does this
      and that ...
    =end
    .method3

    # => Error

It is confusing that putting comments between lines in a method chain is sometimes allowed and sometimes not. I think it would be convenient if comments are allowed in these positions even when the following line starts with a period, and I request this as a feature. Currently, it returns an error, which means that, if such syntax were allowed, there would be no conflict with the existing syntax.

Furthermore, putting the period at the beginning of a line is suited for method chains because the period will visually work as bullets, and it makes more sense to have comments right before those lines.


-- 
http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/