Re: st: RE: mulitple comments using // and #d;

["Michael S. Hanson" <mshanson@wesleyan.edu>]

On Sep 1, 2006, at 3:52 PM, Nick Cox wrote:

> s Stata expected to act on both semi-colons or
> just the end one? A rule that some characters
> are _forbidden_ within comments would be most
> unStataish. Comments should be your own space.
>
> If that's the diagnosis, then // is incompatible
> with #delimit ;
>
> -- and that's not a bug or a misfeature or even a  
> limitation. It's just a fact of life.
>
> Someone may have a better story.
	I don't necessarily have a better story, but some additional  
observations and suggestions.

	First, I agree with Nick that using -delimit- is not the best way to  
program in Stata (any more).  At best, I would suggest, it is a relic  
of times gone by, and should be depreciated in favor of ///.  But  
that also may give one a clue towards what might be a "better" story.

	Consistent with some other program languages (which I mercifully  
have long stopped using), Stata also allows a comment to be denoted  
by an asterisk -- *if* it is the first character on a line.  Thus, while

#delimit ;
// comment
// comment;
pwd;

will not work,

#delimit ;
* comment
* comment;
pwd;

*does* work, provided the trailing semicolon in the final comment is  
included.  I suspect that * comments are parsed differently than //  
comments -- which, incidentally, can appear anywhere in a line -- and  
that is why the second example works.  While I completely lack any  
supporting evidence, I suspect this too, is a relic of times gone by.

	Alternatively, if you *start* a // comment line with a semicolon, as

#delimit ;
;// comment
;// comment
pwd;

the code works as well, but IMHO that is *really* ugly.  Again, I  
suspect your best bet is to scrap the use of -delimit- and adopt //  
for comments and /// for line continuations.  With a decent text  
editor, you can have these character strings highlighted as a unique  
part of the syntax, which makes editing your code that much easier.   
(I also think it would be helpful if Stata's build-in editor provided  
some degree of basic syntax highlighting, as in this example, but I  
recognize that is a controversial view around here... to say the least.)

                                        -- Mike


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