From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2007-09-20T18:32:29+09:00
Subject: Re: how can I remove all the comments in my c program.

Marcin Raczkowski wrote:
>> Worshipping comments is an intermediate, not advanced, behavior.
> i don't understand this statement... but if it means what i think it 
> means you are seriously wrong, comments are more important the better 
> you are becouse more advenced programmers tend to use lots of idioms 
> and write optimized but not easilly readable code
>

Some programmers seem to think that comments are an excuse for badly 
written code. Well written code should be readable to a programmer 
proficient in the language in question, this means that the need for 
comments is reduced. People who insist on comments for everything tend 
not to be good programmers. People who do not write any comments are 
idiots no matter how advanced they are. There is always a need for 
comments, it just depends on the degree.

As to idiomatic code, if you are an X programmer you should be familiar 
with the idioms, if not learn some more. Also what is called idiomatic 
depends on you background, ++x could be considered an idiom if your 
background was perhaps COBOL, FORTRAN or LISP. Do you really expect such 
code to be commented just in case someone isn't familiar with the 'idiom'?

>>
>> Comments have plenty of legitimate reasons to disappear, not least of 
>> which is comments written only to satisfy some perverse mandated code 
>> rules.
>>
>
> i understand NOT writing comments, i do it myself often ... but if you 
> already have them in C code ... then why remove them?
> if you compile code the'lll disapear anyway.. i doubt he works on 
> project that's source code is larger then 10mb compresed (and source 
> files compress with 90% ratio) so size is probably not the problem 
> euther...
>
> Philip could you tell me one legitimate reason to remove comments from 
> c code?
>

The comments might be wrong! Comments tend not to be updated with the 
same rigour as the code. It is sometimes better to throw the comments 
out and make the programmer read the code to determine what it is doing 
than be led astray by badly written comments. The code is the authority 
as to what the program is doing, the comments are just commentary and 
cannot affect the execution of the code. Of course the *best* course of 
action is to completely rewrite the comments but if you can't do that 
then I would recommend removing comments that serve only to confuse the 
programmer.