Multi-line comments on .pest grammar format

[felix91gr]

Hi all,

I'm currently working on documenting the grammar of my language (an extension of Tiny-C) and the line comments are nice, but I'd like to be able to write multi-line comments for two reasons: format and ergonomics.

Format

Single-line comments tends towards this kind of formatting:

////////////////////////////////////////////////
//                   Terms                    //
////////////////////////////////////////////////

//  Terms are the smallest concept in this grammar.
//  A term can either be:
//   - An expression (nested between two parenthesis)
//   - An integer literal
//   - A variable's id

//  Terms can be evaluated to have a value. In the 
//  case of the "expression" kind of Term, their
//  value is propagated to the left like this:
//   "a = 5"          // Value is 5
//   "1 < 2"          // Value is 1
//   "1 - (2 < 3)"    // Value is 0

Whereas with multi-line comments it would look like this:

////////////////////////////////////////////////
//                   Terms                    //
////////////////////////////////////////////////

/*
  Terms are the smallest concept in this grammar.
  A term can either be:
   - An expression (nested between two parenthesis)
   - An integer literal
   - A variable's id

  Terms can be evaluated to have a value. In the 
  case of the "expression" kind of Term, their
  value is propagated to the left like this:
   "a = 5"          // Value is 5
   "1 < 2"          // Value is 1
   "1 - (2 < 3)"    // Value is 0
*/

Multi-line comments are usually easier to read and feel less cluttered.

Ergonomics

With single-line comments you have to manually start a comment every time you want to write another line, which isn't as good as it could be in the ergonomic sense.

Editing is also easier with multi-line comments: the two slashes (//) that you would otherwise have to manually edit alongside your text aren't there anymore. This makes documenting the grammar inside its own file that much easier.

---

Anyway, I might be completely wrong here. I've only been using Pest for like 3-4 weeks. But I'd love to have multi-line comments inside the grammar files.

If you agree with me, I'll happily make the PR. What file should I edit? I get the feeling that I should add the multi-line option here.

Have a good weekend 🙂

[dragostis]

Thanks for writing this out. 😃 I'm generally in favor of this change. Keeping this similar to Rust is a good trend and I guess it should be as easy as possible to change from Rust to pest and back. Would you like to give this a try?

[felix91gr]

Sure! I'll make a couple test cases as well and issue a PR :)

[felix91gr]

Solved by #332