Re: the competition's expm vs ours

[John W. Eaton]

On 10-Dec-2008, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| A comment after code should start with #.
| There's nothing describing ### comments.

They would be used for comments that are not indented at all, no
matter where they appear.  I don't think these are used anywhere in
the Octave sources.

| Is this correct? The text also says the # comments should be aligned,
| but doesn't specify it:
| Does it matter to what column? Can it vary throughout the file?

I don't think it matters.  But the idea would just be to try to write

  foo ();        # comment foo
  other_foo ();  # comment foo

instead of

  foo (); # comment foo
  other_foo (); # comment foo

But I generally try to avoid these kinds of comments anyway.

| In that case, I'd like to note a quickscan just showed that people
| write ~ 6 times often code on stand-alone lines
| (not counting comments starting in the leading column).
| Just try in the scripts dir
| grep ' # ' `find -name '*.m'` | wc -l
| grep ' ## ' `find -name '*.m'` | wc -l
| So, could it be done the other way around? # for stand-alone, ## for
| trailing comments?
| It's easier to type a single comment sign than double, so IMHO it only
| makes sense to let the more often used to be the easier to type.

This style follows the comment convention used for Emacs Lisp files.
I understand the complaint about ease of typing (it is easier to type
the Lisp comment character, at least on US keyboards) but I'd rather
not change this convention now as it would generate a really large
diff for what I see as little benefit, and would disrupt applying
patches for a while.

jwe