[vtk-developers] Hinting proposal

[David Gobbi]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 2:37 PM, Michael Halle <mhalle at bwh.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Since VTK already uses simpler text-style comment directives (//BTX, etc.),
> perhaps you could just choose something like (choose your combo):
>
> // PRAGMA:NewReference
> or
> // HINT:NewReference
> or
> or an extended version:
> // HINT:NewReference=true,ReturnElementCount=3
>
> (names could also be VTK_PRAGMA or VTK_HINT).
>
> On first glance, I find the HTML comment style to be confusing, because it's
> only ever seen in HTML, not in C++ code or plain text.  It's also not
> especially pretty. :)  Perhaps it has an advantage I'm not seeing....

The <!-- --> style is for compatibility with doxygen, i.e. so that doxygen
can automatically filter out the hints.  I also want to use a format that can
be easily converted to xml.  And since the wrappers already do basic html
parsing of all code comments, it will be easy to implement.

 - David