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Overload Journal #37 - May 2000 or Programming Topics or Letters to the Editor

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Code in Comments

Site Administrator

01 February 2004 19:38:18 +00:00

We have all seen comments in source files which look more like executable code than documentation.

The first line in the body of the for loop below is such a comment: you might expect to be able to remove the leading slashes and have code which compiles and runs, but functions slightly differently.

What did the author of this comment intend?

Example 0

for (Surfaces::iterator sf = surfaces.begin();
     sf != surfaces.end();
     ++sf) {
  // std::cout << "Drawing: " << *sf << "\n";
  sf->draw();
}

OK, I’m being disingenuous. I’m aware that the comment isn’t really a comment, it’s commented-out code. And, like any tolerant and capable programmer, by examining the surrounding context I can guess why this code has been commented out.

This article examines how to comment out code, then describes various problems which lead to code being commented out, before finally arguing that there’s often a better solution to these problems.

Comment on “Problem 11”

Site Administrator

01 February 2004 19:38:02 +00:00

The first step here in finding problems in the code is to identify the problem the code is trying to solve. The discussion in the C Vu article is basically about curiosities in the way in which the C++ standard library std::istream is defined, but I will make the perhaps unwarranted assumption that what the problem the code is really about is not the uses of std::istream, but rather, more generally, how to write a read routine that can effectively and safely capture data from an input stream. Actually as the first problem below illustrates neither of these issues can be effectively addressed without the other.

Student Code Critique Competition 26

Site Administrator

01 February 2004 01:21:34 +00:00

This item is part of the Dialogue section of C Vu, which is intended to designate it as an item where reader interaction is particularly important. Readers’ comments and criticisms of published entries are always welcome.