Yes, that's a flower box (shudder).
When I start maintaining somebody else's code I usually adopt their comment style for the sake of consistent code.
And that's an excellent idea. It's unbelievably tempting to go in and start making wholesale changes, but that's wrong for a couple of reasons:
- You just know you're going to break something (and tests may or may not catch that -- but why risk it? Oh, you don't have tests?) ;)
- It's not in the budget ("Um .. you've been reformatting comments for the last four days?")
- You may just end up confusing yourself further -- your brain's figured out how the old code worked, but now that it's in a new format, you have to learn it again. And if the original author comes back, a) they won't be happy, and b) it will take them longer to 'reload' what the codes does since it's not in 'their' format anymore.
And you've nailed down why -- it's most important to maintain consistency in a piece of code. A module that shows multiple styles is a module that's destined for failure -- it's a Tower of Babel thing.
Alex / talexb / Toronto
"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|