[xquery-talk] comment out all the rest of the program

[Michael Kay]

 >You see I sadly miss the ability to add # to comment one line =bla

I guess every programming language has some individual features which 
will be sorely missed by someone coming to XQuery from that particular 
language. (I still pine after a language that allowed spaces in variable 
and function names). The consequence of this line of reasoning is that 
XQuery should offer every feature that has been offered by every other 
popular programming language.

Personally, I've never come across a "comment to end of file" feature in 
any of the many languages I have used, and have never felt a need for 
it. As for "comment to end of line", we made a conscious decision that 
in many of the environments where XQuery is likely to be used, line 
endings are potentially unstable (e.g. they can be normalized away if 
used in XML attributes) and that it was therefore a bad idea to treat a 
line ending differently from a space.

Michael Kay
Saxonica