Dan Ingalls wrote:
> 
> Folks -
> 
> As many of you know, the prettyPrinter does not do a great job of placing comments.  Has anyone out there improved this situation, preferably without too many other changes?  Pointers to any related work appreciated.
> 
> Thanks
>         - Dan

The comments are misplaced because there is an overly early optimisation that takes
place during parsing.  This is repairable ( to some extent ) by removing that optimisation.
That optimisation properly belongs in the code generation phase, not during the parse
tree construction phase.

There are other issues, which to some extent can be inferred- comments placed at the
end of a line but prior to a line ending ought to be marked by the parser in a special
way, also it would be good if the parser were able to apply some heuristics about
making a better guess about whether the first comment in a method belongs to the
first statement of that method, or to the method.  There are a few gray areas like
that, but decent heuristics could probably be devised to do well in most cases.

- les