[TUHS] Comments in early Unix systems

[Andy Kosela]

On Wednesday, March 21, 2018, Warren Toomey <wkt at tuhs.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 04:13:42PM -0400, Paul Winalski wrote:
>
>> To bring this back to Unix, how well have the various commenting
>> principles we've been discussing been adhered to in the code base?
>>
>
> This is something that has bugged me forever.
>
> The Unix design is simple and elegant. The manuals are lucid and
> understandable. However, there is next to no commenting in the
> early code bases. Why? [and I know ken is reading this]
>
> Given that the comments never made it into the compiled code, there
> was no space reason to omit comments. There must have been another
> reason.
>
>
I think some answers could be find in "Practice of Programming" by Rob Pike
and Brian Kernighan.  In the section about comments they express why they
are not big fans of verbose commenting style.

They also state: "Comments are meant to help the reader of a program.  They
do not help by saying things the code already plainly says, or by
contradicting the code, or by distracting the reader with elaborate
typographical displays.  The best comments aid the understanding of a
program by briefly pointing out salient details or by providing a
larger-scale view of the proceedings."

--Andy
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