I've been thinking about those comments overnight, and I don't have any particular objection to them. Certainly not the second one anyway. I think that one could easily fall under the auspices of my statement from the OP

Cool. It could eaisly be that I've gotten an exaggerated impression of how sparse you think comments need to be -- and by the way, I agree that it's certainly possible to have a surplus of comments that just become inane (most would agree that every line is too many, for example). Unlike what some people here are saying, though, I find that problem to be tremendously rare. Far more common is the "it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand" attitude.

That said, context is everything, and your snippet in isolation of the code (and further commenting) around it, makes it hard to decide if these are really warrented or not.

I think we're wandering afield, but the context is, of course, href-based objects, in this case using a seperation of instantiation from initialization. I'm playing with a simple "new" routine (inherited from Class::Base) which calls an "init" sub. I've used a version of init (generated by template) that looks something like this:

sub init {
  my $self = shift;
  my $args = shift;
  unlock_keys( %{ $self } );

  # $self->SUPER::init( $args );  # uncomment if this is a child class

  # define new attributes
  my $attributes = {
           ### fill-in name/value pairs of attributes here
           # name            => $args->{ name },
             attribute       => $args->{ attribute },
             objectdata      => $args->{ objectdata } || 23,
             parameter       => $args->{ parameter } || 'bupkes',
           };

  # add attributes to object
  my @fields = (keys %{ $attributes });
  @{ $self }{ @fields } = @{ $attributes }{ @fields };    # hash slice

  lock_keys( %{ $self } );
  return $self;
}
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Note: some of the comments there are intended to be deleted as the code goes from template form toward production use.

In general, the reason I think we're wandering afield is that I make no claims that these constructs are the best way of doing things. The question at hand is that if you are going to do something like this (e.g. use a mildly obscure feature such as a hash slice) is there something heinous about labeling it as such in a comment.