[Leor: using POD to "comment out" Perl code]
[Dan: don't do that]
[Leor: then what?]
And you couldn't figure out that Perl's goto was *exactly* what you
needed?
goto end_comment1;
perl code commented out
end_comment1:
By using a consistent naming convention for the label names (as suggested
above) you could immediately tell the difference between a "good" goto
(if you used any in your code) and the ones used for commenting out
large blocks of Perl code.
That's an even worse idea than the POD idea! First of all, if you
use a "consistent naming convention" for all those comment-block-
delimiting labels, you'll eventually slip up and type the same label
name twice. Then you'll have
goto foo;
blah;
foo:
bar;
goto foo;
baz;
foo:
about which 'perl' will not complain at all, according to the cursory
test program I just ran. So you'll get an infinite loop when you
thought you were just skipping down the page!
Secondly, 'goto' does NOT remove the offending code from the program!
It will still be not only parsed, but actually run: any 'my' variables
in the "commented-out" section will get declared, for example. So
you'll end up with errors at best, and silent bugs at worst.
The best way to "comment out" Perl code I can think of --- and I
don't pretend to be any good at Perl --- is to simply enclose the
offending code in a here-document, like this:
<<'COMMENT';
my $j = 42; # This variable will never be declared!
comment1: # This label will never be jumped to!
biguglypieceofcode; # This code will never be compiled!
COMMENT
;
Perhaps if you ask a Perl hacker, he'll tell you how to make that
construct more user-friendly with some kind of macro or something,
I dunno.
And just for the record, from the mouth of 'perlsyn' itself:
"One may also use pod directives to quickly comment out a section of
code."
(-:
-Arthur
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