"//" as comments ?

[yunxing]

Currently we only support "/*" as comment.

Should we also support the format of "//" ?

[jordwalke]

Many people really love these. I wonder how we might represent them. In the simplest case, you could imagine merely formatting any comment that contains no newline as a line comment.

(* this comment*)

would become:

// this comment

The only downside is that when you parse in Reason:

/* This Comment */

It would be printed as a line comment.

There would also be an extra check to make sure you're not already inside of a comment (nested).

I don't have any strong opinion in support/opposition to line comments. However, I like that it makes the technology more familiar to people.

[cristianoc]

This discussion points to a consequence of Reason's design that I had not thought about much.
Inside the language there's also a "ghost language": all the things that are parsed, but will never be printed.
For the sake of discussion, a simple implementation of // would be to just add it to parsing but not to printing. So it would always be converted to /* stuff */
Even without thinking about comments, there are probably ghost things already.

[jordwalke]

Another example: (((3 + 2)))

[jordwalke]

It seems people really want this. @yunxing, seems like a good first issue for contributors.

[yunxing]

Yes, I was thinking about this as well (and I also really want this).

I haven't found a good solution except for Cristiano's idea. But maybe
people who is gonna work on this issue can come up with a better idea.

It seems people really want this. @yunxing https://github.com/yunxing,
seems like a good first issue for contributors.

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#80 (comment)

[jordwalke]

I think it's just as easy to add it to both parsing and printing. Shouldn't it just be as easy as printing comments with no newlines as //?
So you could write either of the following, and they both become normalized to // line comments.

// This is the same thing
/* This is the same thing */

[jordwalke]

The only challenge here is making sure that the operator // is properly representable, but I believe we may have already taken care of that.

[bordoley]

Any update on this. In my brief experience using reason, this is by far the most frustrating limitation of the syntax.

[jordwalke]

No update yet. We can probably just print any comment as a single line comment automatically that:

1. Contains no newline: So /* this */ would be printed as // this.
2. Is guaranteed by the formatter to not have any content after it on the same line. For example, if we know that the following could never happen:

/*we have to make sure  */ this could never happen