This idea occured to me as I was reviewing a Rakefile recently.

Ugly

Rakefile task comments are a bit ugly. Since I want Rake to report task descriptions, I can’t use regular Ruby comments (which would be invisible to Rake). Instead, Rake will use the desc command, as in:

desc "This task will do something" 
task :do_something do ... end

An Alternative Syntax

While I was reviewing a Rakefile recently, it occured to me it would be entirely possible to write a task comment like this:

-- "This task will do something" 
task :do_something do ... end

You can think of this as a kind of marriage between Ada comments (using—) and Smalltalk comments (using ’”’).

The Implementation

  class String
    def -@
      desc self
      0
    end
  end

Yep, its that simple.

Fortunately, my better judgement took over at that point and this comment style will not make it into Rake. Unfortunately, it didn’t take over in time to prevent me from blogging about it.