Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!sdcrdcf!trwrb!desint!geoff
From: geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: American Programmer (What's a Ph.D. worth?)
Message-ID: <1718@desint.UUCP>
Date: 12 Apr 88 05:47:02 GMT
References: <2218@ttidca.TTI.COM> <3850008@wdl1.UUCP>
Reply-To: geoff@desint.UUCP (Geoff Kuenning)
Organization: Interrupt Technology Corp., Manhattan Beach, CA
Lines: 16

In article <3850008@wdl1.UUCP> rhj@wdl1.UUCP (Bob Jones) writes:

> I find that the very act of writing the comments forces me to
> think the problem through; and I often find that while I am
> writing these function level comments, I see a design problem 
> that I can still correct easily.  Correcting it after it has
> been coded is much harder.

I couldn't agree more strongly.  Recently, I discovered that my new
ispell needed a *very* tricky routine.  I spent over a week, on and off,
writing the outline of the algorithm in the routine header.  But once
I got the comments right, it was very easy to write the routine itself.
(For those who care and can remember for a couple of months until I post
it, the routine is "combinecaps" and it's in the module makedent.c).
-- 
	Geoff Kuenning   geoff@ITcorp.com   {uunet,trwrb}!desint!geoff