From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 109fba,f292779560fb8442 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 10db24,30e368bdb3310fe5 X-Google-Attributes: gid10db24,public X-Google-Thread: 1014db,30e368bdb3310fe5 X-Google-Attributes: gid1014db,public X-Google-Thread: f8c65,30e368bdb3310fe5 X-Google-Attributes: gidf8c65,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,30e368bdb3310fe5 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1008e3,30e368bdb3310fe5 X-Google-Attributes: gid1008e3,public X-Google-Thread: fac41,af40e09e753872c X-Google-Attributes: gidfac41,public From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU (Richard A. O'Keefe) Subject: Re: Hungarian notation Date: 1996/05/28 Message-ID: <4oehnp$onn@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 157122930 references: <31999F43.41C67EA6@scn.de> <4o07o9$rfu@seagoon.newcastle.edu.au> <4o1vo3$p2a@news1.ni.net> organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.modula3,comp.lang.modula2,comp.edu,comp.lang.eiffel nntp-posting-user: ok Date: 1996-05-28T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff) writes: >P.P.S. My take on comments is: Comment (only) where necessary. Whenever >you can express some fact in the programming language, it's better to do >that than to write a comment. I like reducing things to slogans. I haven't been able to come up with a good one for this. What I say is "Your comments should tell a human reader precisely the things s/he needs to understand the purpose and operation of the module but are not obvious from the code." This is the right stuff, but it needs to be said better. Can anyone come up with a really memorable way of expressing this? >Any time you feel the need to write a >comment, that's a failure of the programming language -- it can't >express what you need to say. I don't know that I agree with this. How can the code make it clear why you chose *not* to do something? How does the code describe the space of possible tradeoffs from which you selected this particular point and why? -- Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++ ??? Richard A. O'Keefe; http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ok; RMIT Comp.Sci.