Re: SQL command to edit postgresql.conf, with comments

Richard Broersma wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 3:54 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>> Oh. Now that's an interesting perspective ... you're suggesting that we
>> take the comments and apply them as COMMENTS on the specific pg_settings?
>
> On a side note regarding comments, I'd like to make a request for a
> more comprehensive commenting mechanism. The first though that comes
> to my mind would allow for comments to be stored and annotated using
> XML or sgml. It'd be nice to be able to generate user documentation
> from selected comments taken from application derived database
> objects.
>
> I don't know, maybe this is already possible.

When you start going there, you have new issues to consider. (For the record I
also prefer plain text for comments.)

I should point out that the group making the Perl 6 language has already been
looking into such matters extensively of essentially unifying code comments and
code documentation into a common metadata both accessible in the source code and
programmatically at runtime.

I think this approach goes beyond comments as we normally know them, which I
just think of plain text strings associated with some code element.

But if you want to pursue bringing documentation into this, I suggest looking at
what Perl 6, and other languages, have done.

While some of the results of the Perl 6 discussion may have just been in the
forums, these urls at least are related to it:

- http://perlcabal.org/syn/S02.html#Whitespace_and_Comments
- http://github.com/perl6/specs/raw/master/S26-documentation.pod for

I'm not proposing adopting their syntax, but some features or design may be
useful to learn from.

I also want to point out that the FoxPro language constitutes some prior art
about including comments as data fields in their runtime-accessible objects.

-- Darren Duncan