Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 01:10:27 +0200 From: Philip Paeps <philip@paeps.cx> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Cc: Jonathon McKitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> Subject: Re: Code layout and debugging time Message-ID: <20030422231027.GV666@juno.home.paeps.cx> In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.1.20030422205617.0387b378@popserver.sfu.ca> References: <5.0.2.1.1.20030422171035.01c5e258@popserver.sfu.ca> <5.0.2.1.1.20030422205617.0387b378@popserver.sfu.ca>
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On 2003-04-22 21:01:01 (+0100), Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk> wrote: > At 12:14 22/04/2003 -0700, Terry Lambert wrote: > > If you ever find and Open Source that qualifies as "heavily commented", > > let us know, and we can go take a look. > > Well, not Open Source, but I have seen quite a few undergraduate programming > assignments which have "pixie dust" comments. Some people take their > instructors' advice to "comment everything you write" a bit too seriously, I > think. Instructors often neglect to mention that if it can be said in code, there's really no point in saying it again in a comment :-) I occasionally even see things like this: /* this prints a line of text */ fprintf(stdout, "a line of text\n"); Completely pointless. The same people who will write that, however, will also indulge in writing long blocks of extremely creative and 'dense' code, without a comment anywhere in sight. *sigh* Someone should write a book about how to comment code. Or a language which ignores code and only compiles comments. Like 'whitespace' which ignores everything other than whitespace :-) - Philip -- Philip Paeps Please don't CC me, I am philip@paeps.cx subscribed to the list. You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny.
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