[Python-Dev] PEP 350: Codetags (original) (raw)

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Tue Sep 27 09:09:06 CEST 2005

On Monday 26 September 2005 05:35 pm, Micah Elliott wrote:

Please read/comment/vote. This circulated as a pre-PEP proposal submitted to c.l.py on August 10, but has changed quite a bit since then. I'm reposting this since it is now "Open (under consideration)" at <http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0350.html>.

Overall, it looks good, but my objection would be:

:Objection: I aesthetically dislike for the comment to be terminated with <> in the empty field case.

:Defense: It is necessary to have a terminator since codetags may be followed by non-codetag comments. Or codetags could be limited to a single line, but that's prohibitive. I can't think of any single-character terminator that is appropriate and significantly better than <>. Maybe @ could be a terminator, but then most codetags will have an unnecessary @.

The <> terminator is evil. People will hate that. If there are no fields, you should just be able to leave it off. This will have an additional advantage in that many will already have compliant codetags if you leave off this requirement.

You worry over the need to detect the end of the block, but wouldn't '\n\n' be a much more natural delimiter? I.e.:

TODO: This is a multi-line todo tag.

You see how I've gone to the next line.

This, on the other hand is an unrelated comment. You can tell it's not

related, because there is an intervening blank line. I think people

do this naturally when writing comments (I know I do -- I'm fairly

certain I've seen other people do it).

Whereas, as you can see, a mere paragraph break can be represented by

a blank comment line.

Whitespace formatting, after all, is VERY PYTHONIC. ;-)

Delimiters on the other hand -- well, we prefer not to mention

the sort of languages that use those, right? ;-)

Another possibility is to recognize lines like:

#--------------------------------------- #*************************************** #=======================================

I.e. a comment mark followed by a line composed of repeating characters as an alternative separator. These are also pretty in pretty common use.

Cheers, Terry

-- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com

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