comment

programming (Or "remark") Explanatory text embedded in

program source (or less often data) intended to help human

readers understand it.

Code completely without comments is often hard to read, but

too heavily commented code isn't much better, especially if

the comments are not kept up-to-date with changes to the code.

Too much commenting may mean that the code is

over-complicated. A good rule is to comment everything that

needs it but write code that doesn't need much of it.

A particularly irksome form of over-commenting explains

exactly what each statement does, even when it is obvious to

any reasonably competant programmer, e.g.

/* Open the input file */

infd = open(input_file, O_RDONLY);

(1998-04-28)