<snip> Back in the days of fanfold, there was a type of programmer who would only put five or ten lines of code on a page, preceded by twenty lines of elaborately formatted comments <snip> After many years of consulting and support work, I have found that I generally prefer to work on these fellows code. Of course, you may enjoy working crossword puzzles and uncommented code as some sort of a character building exercise; It takes all kinds of people to make the world go 'round! With any luck at all, the original author may have selected meaningless variable name and labels to enhance the challenge. If you are fixing code that someone else wrote, you may never learn the original premises that the code was based on, and you may never figure out how some parts work. I suppose that everybody needs a little mystery in their lives. One of my all-time favorites is uncommented tables of magic numbers, with calculated indexes into them. ARGH! I have further found that code that *I* dashed off in the quick and dirty mode was vary hard to support. In a few cases, it was easier to write it again rather than figure out what I had written before. It is strange that when you were "in the zone" it all made sense and fit together. The fact is that it took a long time working through the problem to get zoned in the first place. Sadly, without good comments, it make take about the same amount of time to get zoned in again. I have also found that when I spent the time writing these comment blocks myself, I was forced to actually work out what I was going to do before I started spewing code -- my code was usually better for it. One of my most amazing observations (to me anyway) is that the extra time spent working through a problem frequently reduced the number of lines of code. Inside of hairy-nasty poorly defined problem, there is usually a tiny little problem with an elegant solution trying to get out. It may be possible that with no useful comments the amount of extra code generated would have taken the same space as the comments. I will go out on a limb and state that the time saved not writing useful comments *will* be replaced by debugging time. Naturally, YMMV Mark Browne _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list