It turns into a hellbound rathole if you take that too far though. I use a compromise approach, which is to try to make at least the variables self-explanatory where necessary, then when the routine is built and ready for the testing phase, I ask myself what additional information a maintainer (in addition of course to the mandatory change log) might need and add in comments in a single after-pass. In such cases, avoiding comments by forcing the code to be self-explanatory would also require sordid travesties of the language to be inflicted upon it. Although, when I was a total newbie and hadn't yet learned about strict references, I didn't realise back then just how horrible it actually was to do things like <travesty>:
{ no strict; return _xyz_must_have_failed_; }

[download]
</travesty> instead of simply 
return 0; # xyz must have failed

[download]

-M

Free your mind

In reply to Re^2: Are there any drawbacks to comments -- can they hurt the performance of Perl code? by Moron
in thread Are there any drawbacks to comments -- can they hurt the performance of Perl code? by jira0004

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.