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.
alan@ctrl-alt-del.com | Note to AOL users: for a quick shortcut to reply
Alan Olsen | to my mail, just hit the ctrl, alt and del keys.
"In the future, everything will have its 15 minutes of blame."
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 23 2001 - 21:00:28 EST