How to Read Other People's Code -- And Why

Re:How to Read Other People's Code -- And Why by bendtheblock on Friday October 23, 2009 @03:59AM (#898430)

When I was studying CS, one of the things I was told was that if you grep and get only the comments out of a particular file/class, you should effectively see the pseudo-code of the program. In reality, I comment very little, just pointing things out that can’t be quickly deduced from casually reading the code.

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Re:How to Read Other People's Code -- And Why by olliesaunders on Friday October 23, 2009 @04:11AM (#898443)

I hope you don't still believe that's a good idea! That's a recipe for out-of-date documentation. Even if the comments are up-to-date they'll only be saying things that can be inferred from the code itself, less precisely.

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Re:How to Read Other People's Code -- And Why by tetha on Friday October 23, 2009 @10:26AM (#898795)

I have to state that I have seen a case where keeping comments around which formed pseudo-code was a good idea, even though it was just once, and it was a very nonstandard case.

Basically, the comments were text and relational algebra in LaTeX which explained the implementation of dataflow equations by using sets and those relational algebra expressions were then implemented in operations on binary decision diagrams. However, as I said: this does not occur often. In fact, one might call it rare ;)

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Re:How to Read Other People's Code -- And Why by bendtheblock on Friday October 23, 2009 @04:49AM (#898468)

I agree totally. That's why I don't do it.

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