On comments

I just have one comment on... comments:

I aggree that comments on code are often be redundant, and so should be used with caution.

But comments on data should be all over the place, especially with Perl complex types (yes, I mean hashes!), a simple comment like

my %nodes; # node_id => ref_to_node

can go a _long_ way to help you or anybody else who has to maintain the code 3 month later.

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Re: On comments by salvadors (Pilgrim) on Dec 31, 2000 at 21:03 UTC
In my experience 90% of comments are unnecessary. But, on the other hand, 90% of the comments that should exist, are missing. Yes, code should be 'self-documenting', but comments should explain why you're doing what you're doing. It's no use being able to understand your regex or complex data structures etc if I can't work out why on earth you're doing things this way in the first place. Of course, to bring this back to the initial point, if you break everything down into simple, short, self-contained functions that do only one thing, and are well named, then it's going to be quite evident what they do, and POD will mostly be sufficient :) Tony	[reply]

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Re: On comments
by salvadors (Pilgrim) on Dec 31, 2000 at 21:03 UTC

should

Yes, code should be 'self-documenting', but comments should explain why you're doing what you're doing. It's no use being able to understand your regex or complex data structures etc if I can't work out why on earth you're doing things this way in the first place.

Of course, to bring this back to the initial point, if you break everything down into simple, short, self-contained functions that do only one thing, and are well named, then it's going to be quite evident what they do, and POD will mostly be sufficient :)

Tony

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