parsing comments in scripts

[Dar Scott]

On Dec 13, 2004, at 7:12 AM, Ken Ray wrote:

> perhaps commenting out the first line automatically
> comments out the whole handler? That is, when you close and reopen the
> script the handler is fully commented?

Like this?

--  I wrote this
--  on Christmas day
--  when others were at play.
local a
on work
    local moss
    put a
end work
local b

==>

--  I wrote this
-- --  on Christmas day
-- --  when others were at play.
-- local a
-- on work
--    local moss
--    put a
-- end work
local b

A script local and a handler is lost by an inadvertent trigger in a 
comment.


It currently works like this:  This script with the first line 
commented...

-- on work
    local moss
    put a
end work

... is virtually compiled as though it like this...

-- on work
    local moss
--   put a
-- end work

... inserting a script local variable.

The technique of commenting out the first line to disable the handler 
does not work in Transcript.

If this is fixed so '-- on xxx' patterns are recognized by the 
compiler, then the "on Christmas day" problem comes back.

As a newbie, I was confused by some commands at the top of a script in 
an example stack.  I thought maybe it was initialization.  It turned 
out to be ignored by the compiler, left there for some reason by the 
script writer, perhaps long forgotten.  Maybe it even had a commented 
out 'on' line, I don't remember.

I would guess that HyperTalk did not have local, global or constant at 
the script level (outside of handlers), so there may not have been an 
issue.

Dar Scott
DSC