Re^2: The art of comments: (rave from the grave)

Again, I was really after live examples rather than wisdom.

Not that your wisdom isn't good, just that I was hoping for a variety of opinions back by examples.

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

The "good enough" maybe good enough for the now, and perfection maybe unobtainable, but that should not preclude us from striving for perfection, when time, circumstance or desire allow.

Comment on Re^2: The art of comments: (rave from the grave)

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Re^3: The art of comments: (rave from the grave) by halley (Prior) on Jul 07, 2005 at 13:53 UTC
(1) You asked for examples of what we think are good comments; you didn't specify that they had to be live code published on the web but I guess that's all you wanted to see. With your followup, your tone sounds more like "show me that all the wisdom isn't just hot air, prove to me that people really bother to comment properly." (2) The pseudocode example I gave was directly taken from my real code; the actual code between the comments would not have contributed much to the discussion so I returned it to pseudocode form. Sorry, but 99.99% of the code I write is not published on the web, nor will it be. (3) You're welcome to browse http://search.cpan.org/ under Authors: HALLEY for three really small examples. Fair warning: these examples are so small and simple that the comments are almost entirely POD, not `#` form. Perhaps someday the example I illustrated will be published, since it's a meaty and tightly-knit component library of over 30 packages, and it has a LOT of weird code that needs commenting. -- `[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]`	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: The art of comments: (rave from the grave) by Anonymous Monk on Jul 07, 2005 at 17:03 UTC
...I wonder if anyone would care to link to one or two examples... Actually, the OP was quite clear that he wanted links to examples, not inlined ones.	[reply]
Re^3: The art of comments: (rave from the grave) by jhourcle (Prior) on Jul 07, 2005 at 13:56 UTC
The problem is that it's difficult to find the ideal comment. It's easier to discuss what makes a good comment, or what doesn't, than to find a file that contains all good comments. It's much easier to come up with a contrived example, than to point to a file, and say 'the comments on lines 1873 to 1904 are great... of course, the rest of them suck'. We can't easily link to modules or such on CPAN, as they're bound to change, and so when someone comes back and reads this thread a month from now, the links might make no sense. If you're really in the mood for specific code -- I'll insert it here: Read more... (52 kB) The thing is -- there's a mix of good and bad comments. There's stuff in there that I said was bad (redundant comments), there's stuff that Forsaken mentioned (writing the logic in comments, then fleshing out the code), there's end-user documentation in pod, there's comments hidden from the pod, there's the comments that brain_d_foy mentioned (WTF Was I Thinking). By my quick count, it's almost 1300 lines total (blanks included), with about 400 lines being pod, 200 non-pod related blank lines, and 350 lines of comments. (leaving about 400 lines actually containing something useful ... although half of those are just for legibility) Update: blah...fixed typo in first line (does or _doesn't_)	[reply] [d/l]


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