parsing comments in scripts

[Alex Tweedly]

At 14:38 13/12/2004 -0700, Dar Scott wrote:


>On Dec 13, 2004, at 1:30 PM, Cubist at aol.com wrote:
>
>>>It may be that us old-timers have to evolve.
>>    I think I see a possible solution.
>
>The editor seems to know the limits of the handler (tab for formatting and 
>handler oriented editing), so it should be able to comment out a handler.

It does - in a fairly trivial way;
     --just do the current handler
     put word 2 of the selectedLine into tCurrentLine
     repeat with i = tCurrentLine down to 1
       if word 1 of line i of fld "script" is among the items of 
"on,setProp,getProp,function" then exit repeat
     end repeat


>   Maybe under the Script menu could be an item named Comment Handler.  If 
> a right click is added to the editor, then it could be there, too.

I think it could. The problem would be in commenting it back in again.

Of course, you could simply bail on that problem, and require the user to 
select the entire (commented) handler and select "un-comment" - but that 
requires the effort we said was undesirable (unacceptable) to comment it in 
the first place.

If you want the editor to have an "uncomment the entire handler" command, 
then it's going to need to look into comments, to see whether or not 
removing the leading comment indicator would leave a line which could then 
be a start / finish of a handler. Doesn't seem too bad to me - but I know 
there were concerns about the interpreter (now the editor) looking at 
comments and guessing about their meaning.

I think the failure modes here (at least, the ones I can think of) are 
fairly pathological; user comments out entire handler, then within that 
block partially removes a comment indicator such that the "uncomment" 
command selects the wrong start (or finish) line.

-- Alex.