ActiveState going the wrong way

Grant Edwards grante at visi.com
Wed Apr 11 22:12:08 EDT 2001


In article <45m0b9.fem.ln at alltel.net>, Maniac wrote:

>I have yet to find a "useless" comment. 

On some projects I'd have been happy with "useless".  After a
few years of "maintenance" comments are often just plain wrong.

I'm somewhat in favor of a nice high-level comment that
describes in general terms what a function is supposed to
accomplish.  Comments on individual lines of code are usually a
signal that the code needs to be re-written.  Re-write the code
to make it's operation more self-evident and delete the
comments.

After being burned a few times, I no longer pay much attention
to comments.

I've seen some particularly obscure assembly language tricks
that really needed line-by-line commentary describing what was
going on, but something in Python should very rarely need more
than a docstring that answers the question "OK, so what would
one use this function for?"

YMMV.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Is this going to
                                  at               involve RAW human ecstasy?
                               visi.com            



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