Jan said: > Unless requested by a client or an employer, the code illustrates how > the finished code works.
The only problem with that is that the code can only illustrate what it actually does rather than what it should do. That's why it's so important to have comments that give the intention of the code, collections of test cases with expected results and other types of documentation. It's *very* important that the complete set of this stuff should be as clear as possible, because most of the programming effort on most projects is in the maintenance phase, and in many cases the maintenance programmers will be people other than the ones who worked on the initial implementation, and the initial developers might not even be available for consultation. Speaking as someone who had to fix many bugs in a ten thousand line system with very little documentation and especially poor variable naming conventions, learning what code does from the code itself can often be quite hard. Rich _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
