I think the story behind the 0 vs 0 // goes like this:
At the beginning, there were comments starting with 0.
Then, new statements got used like
0 BFC
0 LSYNTH
0 L3POV
. At that point of time, new keywords would look like
0 XXX
always. So to evade the danger of clashing with a future keyword, people
started to write comments like this
0 // blablabla
I think that at that time, that was a clever idea.
AFTER that, new keywords were introduced of the form
0 !KEYWORD
which avoided the danger of keyword vs. comment clash by the "!".
This results in that nowadays 2 techniques are present in our files at the _same_ time
to avoid that clash:
(a) keywords are preceded by a !
(b) comments are preceded by a //
We could in fact think of relaxing the rules a bit to allow comments without // again,
but then comments never must begin with "BFC" or "LSYNTH", and that again makes things complicated.
For example, this
0 BFC is something I will do later in this file
will create a parse error. And this one as well:
0 LSYNTH is a quite great tool I like a lot
Thus, the new rules would have to state that and forbid certain comments.
That's ugly. This is much simpler and easier to remember:
Just start real comments with 0 // - at least in official parts.
PS
uh, and separator lines, consisting just of a
0
should of course still be possible and allowed.
That some files currently instead write
0 //
is due to the fact that DATHeader for some time brute-forcely replaced all comments 0 by 0 //,
even empty ones. For empty
0
lines that never was a requirement.
At the beginning, there were comments starting with 0.
Then, new statements got used like
0 BFC
0 LSYNTH
0 L3POV
. At that point of time, new keywords would look like
0 XXX
always. So to evade the danger of clashing with a future keyword, people
started to write comments like this
0 // blablabla
I think that at that time, that was a clever idea.
AFTER that, new keywords were introduced of the form
0 !KEYWORD
which avoided the danger of keyword vs. comment clash by the "!".
This results in that nowadays 2 techniques are present in our files at the _same_ time
to avoid that clash:
(a) keywords are preceded by a !
(b) comments are preceded by a //
We could in fact think of relaxing the rules a bit to allow comments without // again,
but then comments never must begin with "BFC" or "LSYNTH", and that again makes things complicated.
For example, this
0 BFC is something I will do later in this file
will create a parse error. And this one as well:
0 LSYNTH is a quite great tool I like a lot
Thus, the new rules would have to state that and forbid certain comments.
That's ugly. This is much simpler and easier to remember:
Just start real comments with 0 // - at least in official parts.
PS
uh, and separator lines, consisting just of a
0
should of course still be possible and allowed.
That some files currently instead write
0 //
is due to the fact that DATHeader for some time brute-forcely replaced all comments 0 by 0 //,
even empty ones. For empty
0
lines that never was a requirement.