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From: Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Is there a way to do large block of source code comments
Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 22:02:42 +0300
Organization: Tidorum Ltd
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Date: 2014-09-02T22:02:42+03:00
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On 14-09-02 18:01 , Adam Beneschan wrote:
> On Monday, September 1, 2014 12:08:21 PM UTC-7, Niklas Holsti wrote:
> 
>> One of the worst mistakes in the programming field is the choice of
>> the name "comments" for the in-source documentation and
>> description. "Comments" suggests something secondary, incidental,
>> unstructured, incomplete.
> 
> Which is probably an accurate description of how programmers used
> them when the term "comment" was first used.

True for some programmers, but not all of them.

There was also the problem with the interpreted languages like BASIC,
some of which stored the comments in RAM along with the executable
program -- if you wrote to many comments, your program no longer fit in
memory :-(

I actually had that problem once, with TRS-80 BASIC... so I wrote a
BASIC program to remove all comments from another BASIC source text.

> I wouldn't call this a mistake, any more than I'd call it a mistake
> to refer to a memory dump as a "core dump" or to the program that
> translates from a high-level language as a "compiler". 

Ok, you have a good point. I will in the future call it "one of the most
unfortunate choices of a word".

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
      .      @       .