On 17/07/13 00:56, vfclists . wrote:
I completely disagree. It is the code that is the primary expression
of intent not the comments. This is mainly accomplished through
sensible identifier naming.
I perfectly agree, a well formed name is worth a thousand words, in this
context.
Comments exist to compensate for a
developer's inability to express intent through the code and IMHO
should be reserved for this sole purpose. In most cases you should
be able to look at a function signature and know exactly what that
function's intent is. Likewise you should be able to tell the intent
of a class by its name and the names of its public/published
members. This is, at least, what I strive for in my own code. Bob
Martin's "Clean Code" dedicates the entire 4th chapter to the
discussion of comments and make some very compelling arguments for
limiting their use.
That's true, in principle; thou' you shall look at the comments also
like: you cannot express the meaning and whole role of a function by its
name (unless you want to couple wikipedia, of course), especially where
you made some tricks that _today_ they look obvious because you're in
the thing, but _tomorrow_ they might not.
I still endlessly thank myself for having put some of these comments
somewhere in my code, some of 15 years ago... they helped me make the
migration from DOS to Linux a little less hurting ;-)
Of course, we're talking about good and wise use of comments, which is,
IMHO, still an art.
Just my 2c on this,
Al.
_______________________________________________
fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org
http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
