I've been working on the derivative Devel::Comments.

1. S::C inserts a breakpoint at every smart comment. My thought was Why. Some developers are interactive debugger guys, some are print-statement debugger guys. If you want both, well, Conway hardcoded in these breakpoints. If you file a (feature request) bug against D::C, I'll make breakpoint insertion optional in 2.0.0.

2. S::C strongly prefers you to use labelled expressions; I agree it's an issue since I think its best feature is that it generates labels for you. But it's going to have a hard time generating labels for expressions.

Here's what works in your use cases: 

my $var = 'foo';
### "$0 starting"
### $var of $var: "$var of $var"
### $var $var: "$var $var"

[download]

3. Don't forget that ## is not a valid introducer. You must use at least ###.

In any case, yes, the colon is special in smart comments, signifying the end of the label. You don't want to put in two of them, either. The monster regexes that do the source filtering do not like this. You'll notice that a user who filed a bug against an unrelated issue also objects to privileged colons: https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=69712

4. There are excellent reasons to forbid trailing smart comments. To be certain a sequence of octothorpes was intended as a smart comment introducer (and not just some literal text inside something else) would require D::C to parse the whole source code. That said, I'd like trailing smart comments, too. Twist my arm.

As far as the loop progress bars, they are messy and perhaps not of interest to serious developers. If I don't hear strong support, I'm going to drop them in D::C 2.0.0; I may replace them with more abstract loop-tracing.

Feste: Misprison in the highest degree. Lady, cucullus non facit monachum. That's as much to say as, I wear not motley in my brain....

In reply to Re^2: In Defense of Smart::Comments by Xiong
in thread In Defense of Smart::Comments by Xiong

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