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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: The Last Word on Comments (was Re: Hungarian notation)
Date: 1996/06/18
Message-ID: <dewar.835121476@schonberg>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 161541343
references: <DsA0rM.2F4@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> <31BDA39F.14E4@phidani.be>
 <dewar.834584583@schonberg> <1996Jun17.155645.28063@merlin.hgc.edu>
organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: 
 comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.modula3,comp.lang.modula2,comp.edu,comp.lang.eiffel
Date: 1996-06-18T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


"Based on previous posts of yours I suspect you didn't think this one all
the way through. Comments that describe what the code does without giving
away how it does it are hardly trivial or bogus. In fact these are the
basis for information hiding and specified public interfaces of classes."

I certainly agree with that, when I said "what the code does", I was
talking about literal description, but in an earlier post I noted thta
comments which describe the what *abstracted to a higher level* are 
indeed valuable, and can indeed be formalized to a limited extent.

Still only to a limited extent ....

What does this code do?
It examines the data and outputs nice error messages for any inconsistencies

This is a *what* type description, but certainly not one that can be
formalized in any useful way.