>But there seems to be a lot of variation between individual programmers
>which determines their feelings regarding comments.

And we haven't even exposed the true amount of variation
there is. People who think source code is the one true
source of communication about a program have nothing
on people like the inimitable Geoff Chappell (author of
"DOS Internals").

He believes that source code too often obscures what is
really going on, and that the one true source of communication
about a program is the actual machine code. He backs this
up with innumerable bugs he's found by examining machine
code that the source code programmers apparently missed,
either because their compiler had a bug, or they did not
understand the implications of what they were telling the
compiler, and so on. Like the "only the source code matters"
folks, he can make an argument for his position, and point
to examples to back it up. For all I know, if his ideas were
exposed to a broader forum he might convert many to
his way of thinking and programmers asked to understand
a program would routinely refuse to look at not only
documentation and comments, but source code as well!


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