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From: atbowler@thinkage.on.ca (Alan Bowler)
Subject: Commenting (was Re: Hungarian notation)
Date: 1996/05/31
Message-ID: <DsALIu.49F@thinkage.on.ca>#1/1
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sender: news@thinkage.on.ca
references: <4oehnp$onn@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU> <Ds6Hpo.697@mv.mv.com>
 <4omejm$j3a@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU>
organization: Thinkage Ltd.
newsgroups: 
 comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.modula3,comp.lang.modula2,comp.edu,comp.lang.eiffel
Date: 1996-05-31T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


In article <4omejm$j3a@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.EDU.AU (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>
>This is actually part of the problem.  Students are exposed to a *lot*
>of "textbook" code, whose authors have put in comments *to explain the
>LANGUAGE* as well as a the code.  Things that a programmer who already
>knows the language would call "junk comments" are put in to help students
>who _don't_ know the language well, and students learn to imitate that.

I don't think that it is the textbooks particularly.  People add
comments to document the stuff that is not immediately obvious
to them.  Beginning programmers or people new to a language thus
often end up reminding themselves what the language construct does,
and we end up with the classic
     lda   3,dl          Put 3 into lower Q register

"classic" because the programmer later changed to the A register
but did not update the comment.

A more expirenced programmer would be familiar wth the machine
and would likely have commented on the logical effect of the
statement.  E.g.
      lda   3,dl        We need to loop three times.