Date: 22 Apr 2003 20:27:27 -0700 From: swear@attbi.com (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Code layout and debugging time Message-ID: <ehadehc2qo.deh@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <5.0.2.1.1.20030422205617.0387b378@popserver.sfu.ca> References: <5.0.2.1.1.20030422171035.01c5e258@popserver.sfu.ca> <5.0.2.1.1.20030422205617.0387b378@popserver.sfu.ca>
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Colin Percival <colin.percival@wadham.ox.ac.uk> writes: > Well, not Open Source, but I have seen quite a few undergraduate > programming assignments which have "pixie dust" comments. Some people > take their instructors' advice to "comment everything you write" a bit > too seriously, I think. I worked on a project in FORTRAN and Ada which required peer review of your comments before you wrote your code. (Considered to be less costly than doing it in one of the true PDLs (Programming Design Languages) available (some with their own compilers).) After adding the code, you were supposed to be able to filter out the code and still have meaningful comments. It evolved, to a large degree, into a "comment every line" rule, partly for esthetic reasons and partly just to avoid having to worry about whether you'd be criticized for omitting too many. I gotta admit that it tended to encourage the addition of meaningful comments amongst the useless ones, and the comments were nice to have during testing, debug, and upgrade. I think the whole scheme was a response to a DOD requirement for using a PDL to specify the detailed design -- a "product" for one of the big steps of the waterfall software development process. I think the was something like one line of code per hour. Sounds grotesque, but it seemed to work; we turned out a HUGE Unix-based software suite more-or- less on time, with few bugs, and had a happy customer. Of course, I'm sure it was a bit more expensive than most other software projects.
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