Code layout and debugging time

[Terry Lambert]

Colin Percival wrote:
> At 12:14 22/04/2003 -0700, Terry Lambert wrote:
> >I think that there would not be a similar effect, unless the
> >comments were sprinkled throughout the code like pixie dust.
> >8-). [snip]
> >If you ever find and Open Source that qualifies as "heavily
> >commented", let us know, and we can go take a look.
> 
>    Well, not Open Source, but I have seen quite a few undergraduate
> programming assignments which have "pixie dust" comments.  Some people take
> their instructors' advice to "comment everything you write" a bit too
> seriously, I think.

It could also be a matter of "available tools"; for example,
people with comment-folding editors will be much more likely
to comment the bejesus out of things, and make them unreadable
to people without the same tools.

Or people with Emacs will make code unreadable to everyone
else... 8-) 8-) }B^).

People with "vi" (and people who know how to use "grep") tend
to declare functions:

	int
	foo(void)

Rather than:

	int foo(void)

Because they can search for declarations of a single function
in a large amount of source code by anchoring the search to the
start of the line... e.g.:

	cd /usr/src/sys
	find . -type f | xargs grep \^pmap_enter

...Of course, that's just because they haven't learned about
"tags" files yet, I think... 8-) 8-O }B^).

-- Terry