And that's exactly what is wrong with relying upon comments to make your code understandable.

Comments cannot be tested.

Sure they can. You read them and see if they work, i.e. increase your understanding. If they don't, then you need to fix them -- that's actually part of the job of a maintenance programmer. Though you should probably also ask yourself if they might increase the understanding of someone else working on the code (introspection alone isn't enough).

(Note that if you're really in the habit of developing patches with copies of code with comments stripped, then when you port your fixes back to the original, there's a real danger that you're going to introduce code that's not in sync with surrounding comments... you're punting on the problem of communicating with future programmers).

In reply to Re^6: knowing your audience by doom
in thread Programming *is* much more than "just writing code". by BrowserUk

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