Tim Harig <user...@ilthio.net> writes: > I use simple comments that are not effected by white space. I don't > waste my time trying to make comments look artistic. They are there > to convey information; not to look pretty. I really detest having to > edit other peoples comment formatting where you have to re-align > everything if the length of any of comment lines change.
I view source code as primarily a means of communication with human readers, and only secondarily as being machine readable. I therefore think it's worth the effort to make source code readily legible, for example by making effective use of horizontal and vertical whitespace. A long time ago, I spent a little while studying graphic design, so I try to keep an eye on this sort of thing. I'm interested in line length for two reasons: firstly, because I believe that there's an optimum line length for easy and rapid reading, which is probably a bit less than 80 columns; and secondly because I find that I make more effective use of the available space on my screen if I have several narrow columns rather than a few wide ones -- since most lines in source files are short, a wide column ends up being mostly empty on the right hand side, which is wasteful. It's true that a source file is not the same as a typeset document: the most obvious difference is that source files are modified over time, sometimes by many hands, and that therefore some of the tradeoffs are different. I dislike `pretty' boxes around large comments, for example, because maintaining the right hand edge is unnecessarily tedious. But sometimes careful alignment can help a reader spot a symmetry or find his way through a repetitive section such a table more easily. (Unfortunately, I appear to have strange ideas about what `legible' means...) -- [mdw] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
