My wishes about NEW-RPL

[Claudio L.]

(10-01-2016 01:54 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  Hello,

although I am not the biggest fan of RPL myself (to put it mildly) I follow these threads with interest.

One thing puzzles me and is somehow contradicting my own programming experience:

When I add a comment to any piece of program code I usually want it to stay there, i.e. expect it to be a persistent comment. Most of "my" comments are of this type. A temporary comment, e.g. to mark a piece of code which is not finished yet or requires improvement, is rather seldom used. Normally I can remember those tings long enough (yet...).
So for me the logical thing to do would be to mark the more often needed comments in the way that requires less keystokes, which would be a single "@".

But maybe this is just me?

Regards
Max

Not just you. Actually, newRPL has 3 types of comments:
@ = SINGLE LINE
@@ = SINGLE LINE PERSISTENT
@@@ = MULTI LINE

Now the compiler can either compile the comments or not into the binary, based on 2 simple rules:
* A flag that indicates if you want comments or not to be included in your code.
* The @@ comments ignore the flag, and are always included in your code.

So if you are a developer, you'll most likely keep the flag cleared so your comments are preserved across compile/decompile (all of them, not just the @@ permanent ones).

When you want to produce a "release" version of your code, you either use the new STRIPCOMMENTS command on the binary, or change the flag and recompile from source.

The permanent comment @@ is intended mostly for licensing stuff, that you want even your release binaries to carry.

For those interested in testing this: the flag in question is -30, by default this flag is set to 1, indicating comments must be stripped during compile. Just do -30 CF and all your comments will persist.