Achilleas Margaritis <axil...@gmail.com> writes: > So, if the compiler checks the code, and the documentation says > whatever must be said about the program, headers are completely > redundant.
I think this is often/usually not true in practice though. It seems _far_ more common for there to be reasonable header files than for there to be reasonable documentation (in part because much documentation is not actually reasonable). With a module language, one can read the actual source files instead the headers, of course, but this is often much more difficult than reading the header files, because there's _too_ much (usually irrelevant) information in the source files... This could be helped by, for instance, a tool that automatically hid most of a source file for browsing purposes, showing only "exported" interfaces, but I'm not sure it's good to assume such a thing. [My main complaint about C/C++ header files would not be the redundancy of the "interface" declarations, but rather that they contain too much private information that should really be hidden to users of the interface, and so make reading the interface more complicated (similar to reading the actual source file).] -Miles -- Laughter, n. An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable.
