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From: g-rh@cca.UUCP (Richard Harter)
Newsgroups: net.singles,net.cse
Subject: Re: portable code
Message-ID: <6571@cca.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 7-Mar-86 01:22:42 EST
Article-I.D.: cca.6571
Posted: Fri Mar  7 01:22:42 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 15-Mar-86 20:51:37 EST
References: <653@moscom.UUCP> <569@hoptoad.uucp> <11569@watnot.UUCP> <1087@burl.UUCP> <>
Reply-To: g-rh@cca.UUCP (Richard Harter)
Organization: Computer Corp. of America, Cambridge
Lines: 24
Xref: watmath net.singles:10962 net.cse:758
Summary: 

In article <> jjboritz@watnot.UUCP (Jim Boritz) writes:
>
>I have seen alot of assembly language programs some were comment extremely
>well and others extremely bad.  Most of the bad ones were the ones which
>had a comment on every line.
>A great many of the well commented programs had enough comments to make
>code segments easy to understand, but they were far from the comment per
>line guideline which you mentioned.  
>
	Just a, ah, comment.  I tend towards the one comment per line
school myself, both for assembler, and for HOLs that will support it.
(Coupled, of course, with descriptive prologs for program sections --
my programs run about 70% comment material by character count.)  My
observation is that the comments on individual lines have their greatest
value in explicating what you are doing while you are writing the code.
I also find that the thing that it is really important to comment are
the declarations.  Repeat -- this is really important.  The reason that
it is really important is that it forces you to have a well defined
meaning associated with each variable.  In my experience (and I have
a lot of it) conceptually ill defined variables is the second most
common source of logic errors in programming (inability to think is
first.  No smiley, unfortunately.)

	Richard Harter, SMDS Inc.