At 11:01 2001-02-07 -0500, Joe Altman wrote:
I realized late last night what I was probably missing: I am not a
coder. If I understand correctly, 'good' code has comments explaining
the code...usually to the right of the line of code, rather than above
or elsewhere.
No, good code merely has clear and correct commentary. It doesn't matter
if it is above or to the right.
Quite often, it is easier to document a block of code right above the code
than it is to document along the right hand side (there is rarely the need
to document each individual line). For one, you have more space in which
to write a comment if you start in the first column, whereas if you start
at the end of the line of code, you have limited space between that start
point and the right margin (panning to the right to see comments which may
be offscreen is terribly inefficient, and if you print, it ends up either
being truncated or wrapped).
The important thing is to document anything which needs documenting (the
need to double-escape a variable definition which is then used in a regexp
for instance), and to document even things which don't necessarily need
gobs of clarification (a one-liner that identifies the name of a mailing
list you're filtering, because the email address for it might not be the
same - thus, you can easily search your .rc files for the recipe which
pertains to a list).
---
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
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Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
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