Th best code comment story was told by Joe Armstrong " Robert Virding, who developed Erlang with me, was famed for his comment. Singular. The entire stuff he wrote had one comment: in the middle of the pattern-match compiler there was a single line saying ‘and now for the tricky bit".
I want to say it was at Sun in the mid 80s, most code lacked comments but there was one idiosyncratic data structure with field names having specific prefixes - with the comment “She’s Hungarian!” (Hungarian notation, presumably - and who was “she”?)
The structure, probably. In gendered languages objects have a grammatical gender, and "structure" is feminine in at least French, Italian, and Spanish (they all derived from Latin "structura", which is feminine). Non-native English speakers will sometime carry over a noun's gender when writing in English.
I would think securing source code is significantly more important than securing comments. So any encryption or protection would cover the entire codebase instead of just the less important parts
The video only shows some cursing comments from the source code. Did anybody find any real discussions of the internals of gtav after the leak that are interessting? Any new modding projects?
The best comment I ever saw was in a body-corporate-management suite I maintained for a short while.
The comment was at the beginning of a 200 000 line pascal program. It was the only comment in the file.
It advised anyone being approached to maintain it to at least double their quote, as the code used 1 and 2 letter names for variables, constants, functions and procedures. It also advised that the same variables were used for multiple purposes, and that maintaining it was a total nightmare.
The comment was correct. The only variable name that made any sense was l (el, not one), which always held the current line the cursor was on. I was thrilled when I worked out what l (el) did.
-- added clarification due to fonts that make l look like I or 1
34 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 82.0 ms ] threadThese days there will someone who’ll be offended either which way.
1. “May the fleas of a 1024 camels infest the armpits of anyone who overflows this buffer.”
2. “TODO: this function needs to be spanked.”
The structure, probably. In gendered languages objects have a grammatical gender, and "structure" is feminine in at least French, Italian, and Spanish (they all derived from Latin "structura", which is feminine). Non-native English speakers will sometime carry over a noun's gender when writing in English.
The comment was at the beginning of a 200 000 line pascal program. It was the only comment in the file.
It advised anyone being approached to maintain it to at least double their quote, as the code used 1 and 2 letter names for variables, constants, functions and procedures. It also advised that the same variables were used for multiple purposes, and that maintaining it was a total nightmare.
The comment was correct. The only variable name that made any sense was l (el, not one), which always held the current line the cursor was on. I was thrilled when I worked out what l (el) did.
-- added clarification due to fonts that make l look like I or 1