syntax difference

[Rick Johnson]

Chris Angelico wrote:
> Bart wrote:
[...]
> > What will those look like? If copyright/license comments
> > have their own specific syntax, then they just become
> > another token which has to be recognized.
>
> If they have specific syntax, they're not comments, are they?

Yes, they are.

>From the POV of the interpreter, comments are nothing but a
human crutch that is to be ignored.

And even from the POV of a programmer, comments can be more
useful if they are ignored than if they are not. Some
programmers lack the skill required to properly explain the
workings of an algorithm in natural language, and thus, the
reader of such a comment will only become confused.
Likewise, comments are notorious for becoming out-of-sync
with the code. And at such point, comments are not only
_confusing_ or _misleading_, no, they have become _lies_.

The point is, from the POV of the interpreter and the
programmer. comments are always going to be comments
regardless of whether special purpose tools parse them or
not. And given a choice between placing a new burden on a
programmer or placing that burden on the machine, we should
always choose to place that burden on the _machine_.

After all, it's the Python way.

The beauty of type-hint comments is that even without
striping the type-hint comment from the source code, a
programmer can more easily ignore a type-hint comment than
the interleaved type-hint. This is especially true if the
programmer uses an editor which has syntax hilighting. My
syntax hilighter colors all comments a light gray. So
therefore, i can skip block and blocks of comments in a
fraction of second simply by quickly scanning down to the
first line that is not grayed out.