Re: Bulk source search ignoring commented-out code

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 3:56 PM, Dan <dan27649@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Right now, I'm playing around with an idea to use CMPPFM and compare source
> members I want to scan against an empty source member.

Clever.  Nice (attempted) use of the options.

> RPGLE was not as flexible.  In fact, it didn't treat *any* '//' as a
> comment.

That is indeed disappointing, especially in light of the seemingly
as-hard-or-harder multiline /*..*/ being successfully omitted in CL.

To be very pragmatic about this:  The bottom line is that it's a
fairly common request (you'll see folks ask for this in Eclipse and
Visual Studio as well).  Yet no one seems to have it.  (Eclipse and VS
still don't, judging by a bit of quick Googling.)

That tells me that it's not enough of a pain to be worth the
development effort.  My guess is that folks normally just search for
what they are looking for, and then (since this is usually an
interactive endeavor) eyeball the results to check whether they're
within comments (or string literals, which are also sometimes good to
ignore).

The users who are a little more motivated come up with regular
expressions to help handle most of the common scenarios, and you could
of course do that with RDi.  For many, it's a hell of a lot better
than nothing.

But to really Do It Right, I think you have to write your own comment
parser.  It's definitely a shame, since everyone is having the same
thought:  The editor component has already highlighted the comment, so
it has already done the work of figuring out what's a comment and
what's not; if only we could leverage that instead of re-engineering
it.

John Y.