Lance Birch <-> wrote:
> I suppose, but the behaviour surely isn't intended: comments should be
> highlighted as comments, only in certain situations they aren't correctly
> highlighted.  From the end users' perspective it's a "bug" - it's not doing
> what's expected.

> It'd be like saying that the trace-and-no_image bug was a limitation rather than
> a bug (in both cases something that's expected to happen doesn't happen).

  It all comes down to the definition of "bug".

  There are basically three ways a program may work in a way it shouldn't:

  1: A behaviour has been clearly specified when designing the program and
the programmer had the intention to code it correctly, but made a mistake
which slipped during testing and thus the program doesn't work correctly
and against the specification. This is clearly a programming error, ie. a
bug.

  2: Something more or less obvious is not specifically stated as a
requirement for the program, either because of a human overlook or
just because nobody thought about it, and thus it gets never implemented.
Usually it's something that, when the programmer is told about, he goes
"doh, I didn't about that one". In a way one could classify this as a
programming mistake, ie. a bug. It just happened at a bit higher level.
Problems with some POV-Ray features such as related to trace and no_image
fall into this category.

  3: Something was specified differently than what the future use of
the feature requires. The programmer codes exactly and flawlessly as
specified, and the program works as specified. Only in a future unexpected
scenario it turns out that the specification was lacking.
  This is the case with the winpov editor and nested comments: The original
coder never thought that it could be used for a language supporting C-style
comments which can be (legally) nested and thus never bothered to even add
support for that. You have to remember that the editor was a completely
separate and independent program from POV-Ray, and that they were joined
at some point. The original coder of the editor couldn't have predicted
that his editor will be used for POV-Ray SDL in the future.

  It's thus not a bug, it's just a limitation, a flawed design. That, of
course, doesn't mean that it wouldn't be a great thing if support for
nested comments would be added to the editor. However, it would be wrong
to call it "a bug".

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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