programming (Or "remark") Explanatory text embedded in
program
source (or less often data) intended to help human
readers understand it.
Code completely without comments is often hard to read, but
too heavily commented code isn't much better, especially if
the comments are not kept up-to-date with changes to the code.
Too much commenting may mean that the code is
over-complicated. A good rule is to comment everything that
needs it but write code that doesn't need much of it.
A particularly irksome form of over-commenting explains
exactly what each statement does, even when it is obvious to
any reasonably competant programmer, e.g.
/* Open the input file */
infd = open(input_file, O_RDONLY);
(1998-04-28)