Auto comment indented blocks when first line is commented

[Unknownuserfrommars]

Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

Currently: Python does this

class A:
    def B():
        print("Whatever")

When we comment out class A: (line 1), executing it will cause an indentation error (at line 2)

But if we want to comment out a whole class / def / with block, we have to manually comment out EVERY LINE.
Hence, i propose that:
When we comments out the first line of class / def / with block, Python interpreter auto-ignores the blocks in it.
So:

class A:
    # Do something
# class B:
    def func(a):
        print(a)

In the code above, python auto ignores the B class. This could be useful for a big function that errors out but we don't know which line is the problem (and its hard to debug)

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response

[ZeroIntensity]

Hi there! Thanks for the feature request, but unfortunately, I think you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than this getting implemented :)

This would break a lot of code; commented-out function/class definitions in existing codebases could royaly screw things up, because the rest of the definition no longer becomes valid. For example:

class Foo:
    # def a():
         def b():
             pass

The extra indentation on b is allowed in Python--so, was b supposed to be a nested function in a, or was it just a comment that was never removed, and then someone used a different tab-width?

Presumably, it would also be quite difficult to implement, because our compiler and interpreter both ignore comments--we would have to refactor the compiler to emit comments as AST nodes, and then the interpreter would have to be able to handle Python statements (or expressions too?) in said comments.

This could be useful for a big function that errors out but we don't know which line is the problem (and its hard to debug)

Or, you could look at the big Python traceback that comes out telling you exactly where things went wrong 😄

I highly suggest looking into IDEs that come with an "automatically comment-out all selected lines" feature instead. (In fact, I'm not sure I know of an editor that doesn't provide this out of the box!)