Definition of Comment

Definition: Source Code should be written to be self-commenting. This means using reasonable length variable names, consistent indentation and perhaps some kind of type indication in the name. Here are some examples :

int * pint;
int * ptrint;
int ivalue;
float fnumber;

Comments

C, C++ and C# all provide the same type of comments. They are

• Single line starting with // (C++ and C#) _{Note 1}
• All text between /* and */ (C, C++ and C#)
• Special comments with /// < comment tag>_{Note 2}

Note 1 - Single line comments in C are not regarded as very portable. Some compilers e.g. Microsoft's Visual C++ will accept them. Other's won't.

Note 2 - Microsoft's Visual C# has a compiler option /doc that will extract all comment XML tags from the file and put them in a file.

Commenting Systems

There are a number of documentation systems that can extract Documentation from your source code. An example is the Open Source Doxygen.

Glossary:

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