mek@pyuxss.UUCP (M Kaufman) (01/07/84)
If one hypothesizes the existence of maintenance programmers then meaningful comments become more important than the code itself! Good programmers comment well. All others should be forced to maintain multi-thousand line programs in awful, puny languages like assembler (for almost any machine, but especially the Big Blue), or FORTRAN-IV, which packs characters into integers or floating point numbers at will,among other bizarre capabilities. Minimally, comments should be correct and maintained by the developer. I've seen comments ranging from an analogy between the program at hand and "The Lord of the Rings" by Tolkien, to something like R. I. P. LVB in an article about commenting. The R. I. P. LVB was a comment (the ONLY one) in a massive assembly language program. In turned out that the decimal representation of the octal machine code for the line that the comment appeared on was the date Ludwig Von Beethoven died.