Steven D'Aprano wrote:
True, but one can look at "best practice", or even "standard practice". For Python coders, using docstrings is standard practice if not best practice. Using strings as comments is not.
In that particular case, yes, it would be possible to objectively examine the code and determine whether docstrings were being used as opposed to above-the-function comments. However, that's only a very small part of what goes to make good code. Much more important are questions like: Are the comments meaningful and helpful? Is the code reasonably self-explanatory outside of the comments? Is it well modularised, and common functionality factored out where appropriate? Are couplings between different parts minimised? Does it make good use of library code instead of re-inventing things? Is it free of obvious security flaws? You can't *measure* these things. You can't objectively boil them down to a number and say things like "This code is 78.3% good; the customer requires it to be at least 75% good, so it meets the requirements in that area." That's the way in which I believe that software engineering is fundamentally different from hardware engineering. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
