newRPL: Comments revisited

[rprosperi]

(11-03-2015 06:07 PM)Claudio L. Wrote:  Sorry, it makes no sense unless I explain it...

Thanks for clarifying this. I hadn't considered such a rich set of capabilities, but this sounds pretty thorough and useful.

(11-03-2015 10:01 PM)matthiaspaul Wrote:  This is somewhat different from what I assumed. I assumed only @@ comments would end up in the compiled object, whereas @ and @@@ comments would be removed immediately - and therefore just useful when using an external editor. According to your description it depends on a special flag.

Is there a length limit for comment lines?

How are the comments stored internally? Is it a header indicating the type of comment and its size, so it can be "skipped", or are the @, @@, @@@ characters actually stored as part of the comment and thus wasting additional space?

Are comments patchable from outside (that is, no checksums etc.)? This would be desirable to implant version control info, serial numbers, perhaps even fixup data. Is it even possible to change the size of an embedded comment in a binary without invalidating the compiled object?

If comments are patchable, is the system safe when the number of newline characters in the comment changes through patching?

Is it possible for the RPL system to somehow retrieve data from inside comments? If so, build date or version info could be extracted from comments and processed or displayed (instead of putting this in some specially crafted variables).

Greetings,

Matthias

Matthias raised some interesting questions and proposed some interesting capabilities; maybe more than planned (or needed) but nice ideas.

I think the most important point here is that the contents (or absence) of all comments (including the @ separators) should *not* be included in the checksum, so BYTES returns the same value of a given program, regardless of what is within the comments.