On Wednesday, March 21, 2018, Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 04:13:42PM -0400, Paul Winalski wrote:
To bring this back to Unix, how well have the various commenting
principles we've been discussing been adhered to in the code base?
This is something that has bugged me forever.
The Unix design is simple and elegant. The manuals are lucid and
understandable. However, there is next to no commenting in the
early code bases. Why? [and I know ken is reading this]
Given that the comments never made it into the compiled code, there
was no space reason to omit comments. There must have been another
reason.
I think some answers could be find in "Practice of Programming" by Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan. In the section about comments they express why they are not big fans of verbose commenting style.
They also state: "Comments are meant to help the reader of a program. They do not help by saying things the code already plainly says, or by contradicting the code, or by distracting the reader with elaborate typographical displays. The best comments aid the understanding of a program by briefly pointing out salient details or by providing a larger-scale view of the proceedings."
--Andy