(Or "remark") explanatory text embedded in program ef="module.php?name=Lexikon&file=search&eid=1&query=source">source (or less often data) intended to help human readers understand it. Code completely without comments is often hard to read, but too heavily commented code isn' t much better, especially if the comments are not kept up-to-date with changes to the code. Too much commenting may mean that the code is over-complicated. A good rule is to comment everything that needs it but write code that doesn' t need much of it. A particularly irksome form of over-commenting explains exactly what each statement does, even when it is obvious to any reasonably competant programmer, e.g. /* Open the input file */ infd = open(input_file, O_RDONLY) (1998-04-28)
