newRPL: Comments revisited

[Claudio L.]

(11-03-2015 01:56 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  But maybe it's worth clarifying what is meant by "permanent comment". I've assumed this means said comment remains in the compiled object, but if not, then I agree with David, its confusing.

Sorry, it makes no sense unless I explain it.
All comments will be compiled and will remain in the program, so when you decompile you get commented code.
However, there's a performance penalty (minimal) during execution (just skip the comment), so it's understandable that some people might want to strip the comments before releasing their code. There will be a command (STRIPCOMMENTS perhaps) that will do this task on already compiled code. There will also be a flag that controls whether comments are embedded or not in the compiled code (by default, comments will be preserved).
The STRIPCOMMENTS command and the flag will affect the comments as follows:

• Single line comments '@' will be removed by STRIPCOMMENTS, and won't be included in the code if the flag indicates so.
• Multi line comments '@@@' will be removed by STRIPCOMMENTS, and won't be included in the code if the flag indicates so.
• Single line permanent comments '@@' will be NOT be removed by STRIPCOMMENTS, and will always be included in the code regardless of flag settings.
  

The permanent comments are intended for copyright notices at the beginning of the code for example, that the programmer doesn't want removed automatically (they can still be removed manually by editing the code, but that would indicate malicious behavior of the user).