Class comments!?

Blake blake at kingdomrpg.com
Tue Oct 19 00:34:41 UTC 2004


On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 13:06:27 +1300 (NZDT), Richard A. O'Keefe  
<ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:

> It would have taken the original author maybe 10 minutes to explain what  
> he
> was up to in those 20 lines.  It would have saved me a week.

Maybe. I'm not defending this guy; this is the sort of thing that I  
would've provided pages worth of documentation for, and an algorithm I  
would've commented out to several pages, probably.

However if it was really that obscure, it might not have been easy to  
document. I remember once writing a parse routine that was really elegant,  
that worked really well, and yet I was very hard-pressed to explain how it  
worked. And I'm a writer! I knew the code worked, and I could prove it  
worked, but I couldn't explain how it worked.

That hasn't happened to me a lot, but it has happened.




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