I am tempted to say something along the lines of “Yes! another sinner sees the light”, but I won't! As may or may not be clear, I tend to come down in favor of more documentation rather than less documentation— believing as I do that communication is a good thing and that while I may at heart always believe that the source is the ultimate code communication, I also don't see anything wrong with helping things along. I also believe that there are times when comments should be set aside, particularly if I want to concentrate on exactly what is going on in a chunk of code. And if it sounds as if I'm slightly schizoid about this, well then that is probably because I am! It would be a mistake to say that code documentation is a do or don't thing, to say that you should do this much and no more or that you could have any hard and fast rule beyond the most trivial. It is a problem that is usually at least as hard to solve as the writing the code in the first place. There are a host of considerations, who is it for, what does it do, will the author maintain it, and on and on. Ultimately this probably reduces to one of those un-decideable things, emacs versus vi etc. Having waffeled—err qualified all over the place, I would observe the following after 25 years of doing this sort of thing:

• It is far more often the case that there is not enough documentation.
• It is usually easier to make 'too much' into less than 'not enough' into more

Then again, I should probably admit here and now that I have been known to write code to generate documentation and therefore should own up to the outside chance that I am ever so slightly biased—go figure!

hsm