RE: Bulk source search ignoring commented-out code

Time for REXX ???


Roger Harman
COMMON Certified Application Developer – ILE RPG on IBM i on Power
OCEAN User Group


----------------------------------------
> Date: Mon, 18 May 2015 17:49:10 -0400
> Subject: Re: Bulk source search ignoring commented-out code
> From: gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx
> To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> 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.
> --
> This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
> To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
> visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
> or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
> at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.
>