Comments and control lines (# vs. #+)

[Samuel Wales <samologist@gmail.com>]

The following, which is general and I wrote a long time ago,
might also be relevant to the recent thread on comments
breaking lists.

===

There might be really good reasons for the #+ comment
convention in Org, but I am not sure what they are.  So
please bear with me.

This list is not complete or minimal.  Please disregard the
items you don't like.

===

Here are some of the reasons I prefer # to #+ as a
consistent commenting scheme for Org.

  1) #+ is not as standard as #
  2) there are tools for commenting and uncommenting regions
     with #, but not with #+
  3) many users have their own tools that do not
     understand #+
  4) imported (or pasted) text will often have # commenting
     and this will need special processing to make it work
     with Org
  5) fill functions and packages often don't understand #+
  6) plain # works in column 0 in Org, leading to user
     expectation that it will behave consistently in other
     columns as it does in most other languages that use #
  7) parsing commented comments is more complicated and
     error-prone when both are used
  8) internal and external parsers might or might not expect
     a more standard commenting scheme.
  9) indented #+ is not colored as a comment or a control
     line
  10) it is natural to want to do a block comment on a
      section of a list without breaking list structure.
      there are built-in tools for this.
  11) it is natural to want to do an indented comment on a
      single list item at the same level of indentation as
      the bullet
  12) there are tools for auto-fill and indentation within
      comments that take into account # but not #+
  13) some parsers probably expect a single character
  14) internal and external parsers might want a
      special-case-free commenting scheme
  15) #+ indicates an Org control line, so using it for
      comments overloads the syntax

Hope it's of some use.

Thanks.

Samuel

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