Re: commenting sub procedures

I had an instructor in college who faulted a FORTRAN program I had
turned in. I had already been doing FORTRAN programming and needed
the class. The program was simplistic beyond belief. Did a single
calculation and printed the result.

My line of code was:
GROSS = HOURS * RATE

His complaint was that a comment was needed there. In the example
above, a general series of comments was in place to describe what the
program was to do.

Point being that, IMO, comments should describe >what< is intended by
a sequence and explain any odd segments, without just repeating the
code. Seeing something bizarre like the old trick of multiplying a
number by the magic RPG number (which I have forgotten) to change the
order of digits in a numeric representation of a date DOES need a
comment (but that particular multiplication technique is likely best
avoided in the first place.

John McKee

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Charles Wilt <charles.wilt@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Comments lie...

Trust but verify...

Charles

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 10:35 AM, Jerry C. Adams <midrange@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

I can't say that I disagree.  However, I have seen the opposite problem;
i.e., the program logic changes, but the documentation isn't changed.  More
than once I have tried to make sense of a program in which I could see that
it was doing one thing, but the documentation said something different.

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