🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MERNST.90J...@owl.lcs.mit.edu> mer...@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Michael Ernst) writes:
>I seem to remember a line in the Symbolics garbage-collector source; the
>code was long and convoluted, and it contained but a single comment:
>	; Gute Nacht, mein Wesen
>just before a variable's value was bashed.

When I worked for ITT Courier, one of the things I got to do was make some
modifications to the code for the POS (Point-Of-Sale) systems that the
company was marketing to McDonalds. I grew to loathe the code, simply
because the person who'd developed it (and left) had a radically minimalist
and baroque attitude toward commenting their code.

In a three-page loop of Z80 assembler, there was the single comment line,
"Chunka Chunka". Another loop occupying a page and a half of assembler
dealing with controlling the cost display had the single comment "And it
comes out here". Three-quarters of a page of code dealing with error
recovery was commented "Oops". I learned more about how _not_ to document
my programs then than I did anywhere else, though (as well as winding up
memorizing the explosion table for McDonald's products -- howw much of what
goes into each item on the menu, for inventory tracking).


Sean Malloy					    |
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