Python's 8-bit cleanness deprecated?

[sismex01 at hebmex.com]

> From: Piet van Oostrum [mailto:piet at cs.uu.nl]
> Sent: Monday, February 17, 2003 2:21 AM
> 
> >>>>> Laura Creighton <lac at strakt.com> (LC) wrote:
> 
> LC> On more than one occasion I have removed all the comments 
> LC> from some source file before blowing it into PROM.  PROMS
> LC> are expensive.  I would have been mad as hell if after having
> LC> sunk the budget somebody told me that 'oops, certain comments
> LC> are special' and that I have to do the job all over again.
> 
> Then remove comments, except from the first two lines.
>

I think what Laura meant, was that comments aren't supposed
to be "special" or "magical", but "documents".  It's very,
very counter-intuitive that commends are suddenly necessary
for the program to work correctly, because they encode
"magical" information for the compiler/interpreter to use
to understand the program.

Suddenly, all post-processing applications (comment strippers,
variable-name-renamers, etc) need to understand all this magic
in order to work correctly.  Suddenly, the language becomes
less orthogonal, rules which apply to comments now don't apply
to *all* comments, only those without magic mushrooms.

-gustavo