Yes, that's a flower box (shudder).

When I start maintaining somebody else's code I usually adopt their comment style for the sake of consistent code.

And that's an excellent idea. It's unbelievably tempting to go in and start making wholesale changes, but that's wrong for a couple of reasons:

• You just know you're going to break something (and tests may or may not catch that -- but why risk it? Oh, you don't have tests?) ;)
• It's not in the budget ("Um .. you've been reformatting comments for the last four days?")
• You may just end up confusing yourself further -- your brain's figured out how the old code worked, but now that it's in a new format, you have to learn it again. And if the original author comes back, a) they won't be happy, and b) it will take them longer to 'reload' what the codes does since it's not in 'their' format anymore.

And you've nailed down why -- it's most important to maintain consistency in a piece of code. A module that shows multiple styles is a module that's destined for failure -- it's a Tower of Babel thing.

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