Created attachment 699 [details] patch for the lexer I added //! style documentation comments to my dmd and thought I'd share that. Since it only requires minimal changes to the lexer and doesn't add any complexity to the compiler it could be integrated into dmd. Note: Doxygen supports these comments.
What's the advantage of using //! instead of the /// style that is already supported?
Well it's personal taste. As I said, only requires minimal changes to the lexer, Doxygen also uses /// and //!, so why not? It's just a proposal.
The fact that is used often in Doxygen might be a factor to include this patch, since it will make life easier for people used to use Doxygen. Is not a very strong argument for including it, though :)
Except that /// and /** */ are already supported in D and used by doxygen. So, if you're looking for doxygen support, we already have it. It's true that //! is another way to do comments that doxygen supports, but it's not necessary. Also, what exactly is this patch supposed to do? Does it make it so that //! are treated like ddoc comments? Because //! is already a perfectly legitimate comment because it starts with //, and doxygen will read it exactly the same way it reads ///. If it is the case that it's ddoc comments that you're looking for, I'd argue that you should actually use /++ +/ rather than a doxygen style since doxygen comments are done differently than ddoc comments anyway (doxygen favoring tags and ddoc comments being freeform). Regardless, I don't care one way or another whether this patch gets included. I just don't see the point.
The patch makes //! treated as a ddoc comment. As I already said, it's just a matter of taste. I prefer //! so I patched my dmd to be free to choose. I didn't claim this was necessary in any way (which is why this is marked as ENHANCEMENT). It's a tiny 3-line patch that doesn't hurt so I added it here.
I'm afraid, it's useless. Doxygen uses its own markup and macros, they will be treated as plain text in ddoc comments. It's useless.
There was recently a pull request to add this type of doc comments to DMD (I think that it was Trass3r too the one doing it) and it was rejected and closed by Walter & Co. So I think that it's pretty safe to assume that this definitely will not be accepted. So with this in mind I'm closing this bug report. However, if you want to give the good fight and make another attempt, please reopen and add your comments.