Comment programming

Comment programming, also known as comment-driven development (CDD) is a (mostly) satirical software development technique that is heavily based on commenting out code.

In comment programming the comment tags are not used to describe what a certain piece of code is doing, but rather to stop some parts of the code from being executed. The aim is to have the commented code at the developer's disposal at any time he might need it. This is especially useful when the requirements change rapidly. In this case they happen to revert to older versions of themselves, thus making the programmer either write the code again, or revert parts of the code from the versioning repository, which would be more time-consuming. With comment programming, when such a request for reverting to an old implementation arises, the developer just comments the current implementation and uncomments the previous. It is advisable to add short descriptive comments to blocks of commented code.

Practical uses

Comment (computer programming)

In computer programming, a comment is a programmer-readable annotation in the source code of a computer program. They are added with the purpose of making the source code easier to understand, and are generally ignored by compilers and interpreters. The syntax of comments in various programming languages varies considerably.

As well as of direct use to any programmer reading the source code, comments are sometimes processed in various ways to generate documentation external to the source code itself by documentation generators, or used for integration with source code management systems and other kinds of external programming tools.

The flexibility provided by comments allows for a wide degree of variability, but formal conventions for their use are commonly part of programming style guides.

Overview

Comments are generally formatted as either block comments (also called prologue comments or stream comments) or line comments (also called inline comments).

Block comments delimit a region of source code which may span multiple lines. This region is specified with a start delimiter and an end delimiter. Some programming languages (such as MATLAB) allow block comments to be recursively nested inside one another, but others (such as Java) do not.