Re: Loss of Mars Climate Orbiter due to units of measurment conflicts

[Ehud Lamm <mslamm@mscc.huji.ac.il>]

Let's not argue about whether the arguments are real... :-)

I read the discussions, I just wanted to point out that sometimes
arguments cause exagerations and taking the extreme. 

By the way (to make this a little programming related), I think that there
are cases that naming can reduce the need for comments. This is seen with
people who choose very bad names, which must be accompanined by comments -
since they are otherwise meaningless or misleading.
I had a student who called a routine Input - but the routine simply
returned an initial value. Now - a commnet really helped me understand
what he wanted the routine to do. Naming it better would have been a
better solution.

But after stating this rather banal cliam, I think we can agree that with
normally acceptable names, we still need comments since names do not
provided enough information. 

My approach is sually that if someone can misread you, or not understand
your design reasoning - it is much better to explain (using comments, and
some times, god forbid, external documentation), than to solve the
problems that will arise later. 
Usually the someone misreading you, will be yourself a week later...

Ehud Lamm mslamm@mscc.huji.ac.il
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ehudlamm <== My home on the web 
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