Some comments (was Back to the issue... (was RE: Squeak coding style...))

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Wed Mar 3 20:16:15 UTC 2004


"Alejandro F. Reimondo" <aleReimondo at smalltalking.net> wrote:

> What do you think about attaching comments to softare elements?
>  and mantain them by a comment tool?
> 

I love it.  The main thing is to make it accessible in the UI.

As a start, if you select a message category (third pane) in a browser,
one option in the right hand column could be <comment>.  Selecting this
lets you edit a comment for that category.

Similarly, it would be great if at least instance variables and global
variables could have comments.  Mousing over them would give you a
comment for them.  Clicking the "?" button in a browser could give you a
multi-pane comment editor, where you have a pane per variable instead of
just one big pane.  For global variables, wells, we should really have a
global variables browser shouldn't we?  Right now there is *no* UI in
Squeak for manipulating the existence of global variables.

I will leave off commentary on messages vs. methods because other
followups have covered it.  Let me just say it as well is an excellent
idea to put into the tools.

One final issue to consider during all of this: it must *not* become a
large extra burden for programmers to maintain this commentary.  It
should be very well integrated into the tools, and it should be optional
during initial development.

This is a terrific direction for a Smalltalk-like environment and I hope
people run with it!

-Lex



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