Re: comment-kill can't deal with following situation

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>>> comment-kill is defined in newcomment.el.  It is supposed to
>>> kill comments (refer to its document).  But it can't deal with
>>> the cases in which there are more than one comment in a line.
>>> An example is:

Stefan> If you do not provide a prefix arg, comment-kill should
Stefan> only kill 1 comment.  Indeed when providing a prefix arg,

> The document says:

>     Kill the comment on this line, if any. With prefix ARG, kill
>     comments on that many lines starting with this one.

> So, take following C code for example:
> int j; /* comment 1 */ int k; /* comment 2*/

> I think comment-kill should kill both comment 1 and comment 2 even
> without prefix ARG.

Here I disagree.  I find it more useful to only kill one comment at
a time (you can always choose to run the command 2 times, but you cannot
run it 1/2 a time).  Also the docstring says "kill *the comment* on this
line", which admittedly is ambiguous when there are more than
1 comments, but indicates a clear intention to only kill 1 comment.

Stefan> But in the presence of multi-line comments, the behavior
Stefan> doesn't match the docstring either.

> Even if all comments reside in one line and call comment-kill either
> with/without prefix arg, the behavior is in-correct so long as there
> are more than one comments.

We should not make a design decision based on the behavior in one
particular kind of circumstances (only single-line comments), since
that's how we got into this mess in the first place.

So please reply to my previous request:

   I don't know of anybody who uses the prefix arg of comment-kill, so
   if you could explain how you use it, it might help decide what the
   behavior should be.


-- Stefan