🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9209250710.aa13975@thama1.apgea.army.mil> Modula2 List <INFO-M2%UCF1VM.BITNET@cmsa.Berkeley.EDU> writes:
>> In article <I> write:
>> If the Oberon Browser read the source text rather than the symbol file,
>> a convention such as (** could be adopted to denote exported comment
>> blocks.  The empty comment (**), would have to be handled as a special
>> case, but that's easy to do.
>
>    The browser tool reads the symbol file produced by the compiler.
>    However, one could extend your idea easily to the compiler.  The
>    compiler _could_ export comment blocks to the symbol file, but I believe
>    that would make symbol files unecessarily large.

One could compress the comment strings when they are written to the 
symbol file.  That would save some space.  You could do even better
by compressing the whole symbol file on the fly :-).  Another factor
to consider is that symbol files generally aren't very big files
anyway, so it really wouldn't hurt much if they plumped up a bit.
A quick listing of 168 Modula-2 symbol files I have on my Amiga
showed an average size of less than 4K.  After compression (LZW),
the average size went down to 3.2K.  With large numbers of files this
small, the real wasted space goes to directory overhead and lots
of half used disk blocks.

-- 
--Dennis Brueni (N0JSQ)        "The knack to flying lies in learning 
  brueni@csgrad.cs.vt.edu       how to throw yourself at the ground 
  <Project_Envision>            and miss."  -- Douglas Adams