Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 17 Apr 2003 08:07:54 -0700 | From | Randolph Bentson <> | Subject | Re: kernel support for non-English user messages |
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On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 11:02:15AM -0700, Eric Altendorf wrote: > If you find yourself having to write comments and documentation to > explain your code, probably your identifiers are not well named, your > functions are not short enough, and your code is not well structured > enough. > > Ideal code is completely self-documenting.
That's true if documentation serves only to describe _what_ the code does. You've ignored the need to describe _why_ the code was written in this way. For example, documentation can note some feature of the hardware which requires special handling, or it can describe some emergent property which isn't obvious even if all the code is understood.
That's why local comments should explain non-obvious trickery used, perhaps the exploitation of a poorly documented side-effect of some instruction, and block comments or external documentation should help the reader understand why things are done some particular way. For instance, if the code implements some specific, well documented algorithm, it should reference the algorithm by name.
-- Randolph Bentson bentson@holmsjoen.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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