rem : safely comments out imbedded code examples

The situation is common: you want to write long comments to document your code properly :) or to comment out a portion of obsolete code quickly but neatly. rem is a filter which gathers together all of the commenting conventions you are likely to need, and provides one-stop commenting (and eventually de-commenting) according to what you are working on.

Using jstar screen dumps, it would work like this. You type in your documentation, with
wordwrap and other niceties in place, then hi-light the comments and send them through
the rem filter:

Block hi-light some plain text and rem it...

The filter then neatly comments out your text (better than cap3-downarrow over-n-over):

Okay, you could do that through sed or awk or perl , substituting different types of
regex for the different types of code you were editing... what rem does is not rocket science, it simply enables you to figure out the regexes =once= and offer them as memorable mneuonic switches.

USAGE
        rem {-switches}

        Intended to act on STDIN and STDOUT from within a word processor
        (like =joe=) which allows a hilit block to be filtered through
        a shell command. Good for imbedding shell output in your code.

        e.g. ^K/
          Command to filter block through (^C to abort): ls -l | rem -list

    SWITCHES
        -all        pad all lines, even if empty
        -c[har]     [='#'] use the quoted comment character
        -hist       output gleaned from history dump; remove leading line #s
        -in[dent]=n add n[=4] spaces before the line
        -out        flag as program output
        -pad        add n[=2] spaces after the comment char
        -po[e]m     for imbedding poetry in source code
        -pwd=bin    as above, showing pwd
        -shell      flag commandline w/ fake prompt
        -su         flag su-issued shell command
        -man        runs this help section (|txt2man) into a manpage

ENVIRONMENT

        Works well within joe/jstar editor. It's intended that you use this
        with the ^K/ (block filter) command.

BUGS
        Lots. This is version $VERSION.

AUTHOR
        rem is part of the YUCC suite by J.F. Cuff 

__TODO__
    TODO
        -expand     preprocess |expand to convert output containing tabs
        -ls=/dir    do a listing of /dir
        -do='cmd'   run cmd, prepend to comment; then filter
        -un         remove a single level of commenting

This concept needs a bit more work. There are lots of feeping creaturism available for implementation. The next version should implement basic uncommenting of a block previously commented copy. Currently there is only one flavour of comment directly supported (-c for c-style # comments) ... or two, if you count the -poem directive. This filter should implement all sorts of commenting environments via switches (e.g. rem -html; rem -smb; unrem -java). REM's goal is simple: better code documentation (and poetry) through easier commenting.

The creation of a Yetanother Universal Commenting Convention is the subject of a separate to do note.

The code for the current rem.pl is here. (You need to chmod it executable before it runs.)

rem : safely comments out imbedded code examples