Subject: bug#56796: 29.0.50; Hard newlines not respected in code comments?

From: Visuwesh <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2022 20:25:14 +0530

[வெள்ளி ஜூலை 29, 2022] Stefan Monnier via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" wrote:

> At the same time, I'm not sure how important it is to handle hard
> newlines in ELisp comments, so I'm not sure how important it is to
> fix this.  This bug report only gives a (good) recipe but not a good
> reason for doing such a thing, so maybe some context explaining how/why
> such hard newlines can appear in comments would help motivate a fix.

Well, wrt Elisp comments at least, we have the Commentary section where
we write quite a lot about the package in question where having hard
newlines would be really handy since you write those text like you do in
a regular text buffer.

More generally: I'm not sure how common this pattern is but I tend to do

    ;; TODO/FIXME: Something...
    ;; Ideas and thoughts on how to clear it here.

Now if you do M-q there, your neatly arranged text is destroyed.  (I am
probably biased) I also catch this pattern in the Emacs source tree as
well.

[ Although not related to Elisp: Documentation for functions/whatever in
  Go are written as comments.  ]