In the UK teachers make gallant attempts to teach (and so get) kids to think. The problem is that whilst you can make rules about what is taught, you can't force them to learn. So whilst the current UK guidance on teaching makes many encouraging sounding statements on "Higher Level Thinking Skills", and the National Curriculum for Mathematics includes requirements for pupils to be able to estimate answers, once they have discovered Google the vast majority switch off. Couple this with the cult of celebrity then many don't see the need to learn. Dave
-----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List [mailto:ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of David P de Jongh Sent: 10 February 2012 18:05 To: ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: code comments I think a large part of the problem is that kids are not taught to think. There was a classic Far Side cartoon many years ago called "Billy's Nightmare" or similar, where the little guy is in a library where every book is called "The big book of story problems", "The story problem anthology", "Advanced story problems", and so forth. Translating a problem to code, or code to a narrative just seems to be beyond the capabilities of many people. I agree wholeheartedly with John Bodoh's recommendations - a flower box with an overall description of what this section is doing, and a running commentary in the remarks columns, at a more detailed level. I disagree with John Gilmore's assertion that "coding police" do more harm than good - we have strict coding standards and a code quality inspector who has probably the worst job in the department, but makes sure that all code conforms. David de Jongh On 02/10/12, Paul Gilmartin<paulgboul...@aim.com> wrote: On Feb 10, 2012, at 08:58, Kirk Talman wrote: > IBM Mainframe Assembler List <ASSEMBLER-LIST@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> wrote on > 02/10/2012 10:46:35 AM: > >> From: Michael Stack <li...@kcats.org> >> >> And I learned at an early age to look at the object code. This rule >> was hammered home when we purchased commercial software which >> contained such oddities as >> >> R3 EQU 5 > > good point! bad EQUs are worse than bad comments, esp when reading code > involved in sev 1 incident > And I once saw some code that contained such as: ASIZE EQU 24 Array size OK. Parameterized, possibly to allow future modification, which I had to do, including changing the ASIZE EQU. Then I found in multiple places such as: LA R2,ASIZE(,R2) Add 24 ... the comments defeated the modularity/modifiability of the code. I can envision how it took two programmers in succession to do this. The same program also contained: FIFTYSIX EQU 56 Data bytes in a TXT record I suppose the coding standards required EQUates for all self-defining terms. -- gil
