the competition's expm vs ours

[John W. Eaton]

On 10-Dec-2008, Jaroslav Hajek wrote:

| I'm still not getting it. In the source, the line *is* already
| indented. The leading whitespace is part of it. So why not always on
| comment sign? Or does Emacs somehow change indenting of lines when
| displaying files? Or is the purpose that you can automatically
| reindent files using Emacs? Come on, how often you do that? And even
| if there's need, it is possible to do it without requiring a special
| sign for each type of comment, isn't it?

No, Emacs does not change the appearance when displaying the file.
But when editing, if you type a comment and then type TAB to reindent
the line, Emacs uses the content of the current line (and possibly
surrounding context) to decide what to do.  So having three different
styles of comments makes some sense.  And yes, it is common to type
TAB to reindent a line.  I don't see how Emacs could guess your intent
when indenting a comment without the extra clue of # vs ## vs ###.

| > This style follows the comment convention used for Emacs Lisp files.
| 
| Yeah I was afraid that it's something like that :)

Why the fear?  Although it is powerful, Emacs is not scary.  :-)

jwe