[lazarus] Comments

[Shane Miller]

I know from personal experience with Lazarus that when we started the
project (many years ago) we were 3 developers coding and we wanted to
get something up and running ASAP to see if our ideas were sound.  

In general, I agree with Vincent that comments are often unneeded for a
lot of procedures and would simply get in the way.  However, whenever
there are confusing algorithms they should be commented.  At least one
comment to explain a group of procedures would have been a good idea.

Shane



-----Original Message-----
From: Vincent Snijders [mailto:vslist at zonnet.nl] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 8:41 AM
To: lazarus at miraclec.com
Subject: RE: [lazarus] Comments

> Van: Ian Bell [mailto:ian at redtommo.com]
> On Wednesday 26 Feb 2003 2:38 am, jozsef at wingchun.hu wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I'm sure there is the "WHY" poeple do not use comments. I do not
know it
> > and I am curious.
>
> Probably laziness.  Many programmers are so keen to make progress they
> 'forget' to comment thier code.  i think this is a mistake in any
> code and
> especially open source code where the idea is others can look at
> the code to
> undestand how it works and either improve it or derive other code from
it.
>
> Arguments like 'the code is self documenting' just do not wash.
>
> Ian

Maybe writing good, useful comments is more difficult than writing
code...

At least most of the times, when I write a piece of code I don't know
what
to add to it in comments, except the plain obvious like:
function TUnitList.GetItem(Index: integer): TUnit;
The function GetItem returns a Unit from the UnitList. It has one
parameter
Index, which is the index of the unit in the list of the returned unit.

Also it is not immediately clear if some comment is good, usefull. Code
is
checked by the compiler and by tests to see if it works. For comments
there
is no such simple checking mechanism.

Regards,
Vincent Snijders.

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