Re: [OT?] Coding Style

Alan Olsen
2001-01-23T18:48:22Z

On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Helge Hafting wrote:

> Stephen Satchell wrote:
>
> [lots of good advice deleted]
> > One goal of language designers is to REMOVE the need for comments. With a
> > good fourth-generation or fifth-generation language, the need for comments
> > diminishes to a detailed description of the data sets and any highly
> > unusual operations or transforms on the data.
>
> This is but a dream. You can't "design out" the need for comments by
> approaching natural language. Try reading a law book and realize that
> natural language too may be twisted to the extent that it needs
> extensive comments. The same goes for any computer language powerful
> enough to do useful work.

Actually using natural language and other such constructs may INCREASE the
need for comments.

For more examples, see Perl.

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