Turtle feature request : multi-line comments (was Re: Proposed conventions: System Triplestore, turtle Command, Text Embedded Turtle)

[added cc to dajobe & timbl]

One use case for multi-line (block) comments is mixing text and data
notes in the same document and being easily able to separate out the
two later (see earlier posts in this thread). When quickly jotting
notes the # is inconvenient/ugly and block comments make convenient
chunks for extraction.
(There's also the potential for adding any comments as annotation
triples at parse time, though that's almost certainly best left out of
scope.)

I'm not sure of the impact such an addition might have, I think none
but probably only because I've missed something obvious. Maintaining
validity of existing documents seems an essential requirement. I've no
idea of the situation with N3 - on a quick skim of [1] I couldn't see
references to any kind of comments, not even in the BNF.

Regarding specific syntax, Turtle shares the use of # for single-line
comments and """ for long literals with Python, and Python also
supports """ for comments - but this would be a modal marker, which as
David points out earlier in this thread can cause problems. (and I
also wonder why Turtle doesn't already support this style)

Would /* and */ be more suitable (as Steve suggested) perhaps..?

(Making the markers in Text Embedded Turtle non-modal basically makes
it Turtle with block comments, much better idea :)

Cheers,
Danny.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TeamSubmission/n3/

-- 
http://dannyayers.com

http://webbeep.it  - text to tones and back again

Received on Friday, 3 February 2012 17:37:52 UTC