Best code comments in a program

magicMaster said:
What is the best code comments you have seen in a program?
Click to expand...

Off hand, I can't think of any really good ones, but there's a great collection over on stackoverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...ment-in-source-code-you-have-ever-encountered

Some extracts:

/**
* For the brave souls who get this far: You are the chosen ones,
* the valiant knights of programming who toil away, without rest,
* fixing our most awful code. To you, true saviors, kings of men,
* I say this: never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down,
* never gonna run around and desert you. Never gonna make you cry,
* never gonna say goodbye. Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.
*/
Click to expand...

//
// Dear maintainer:
//
// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
//
// total_hours_wasted_here = 42
//
Click to expand...

//When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing
//Now, God only knows
Click to expand...

// I dedicate all this code, all my work, to my wife, Darlene, who will
// have to support me and our three children and the dog once it gets
// released into the public.
Click to expand...

stop(); // Hammertime!
Click to expand...

All programmers have ranted in their comments at some point, but this is classic:

// At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD
// format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it
// such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD
// is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my
// hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion
// of a million suns.
//
// If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in
// different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would
// think of, and do those too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for
// instance, did it suddenly decide that *these* particular chunks should be
// aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement should *not* be included in
// the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, or aligned with
// the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included. Either
// one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one.
// PSD, of course, uses all three, and more.
//
// Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the
// attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark
// attack on his 58th birthday. That last detail may not be important for the
// purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time
// imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of
// a file format.
//
// Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format.
// To do this, I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have
// them consider sending me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing
// them a copy of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can only
// imagine that they make this process so difficult because they are intensely
// ashamed of having created this abomination. I was naturally not gullible
// enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done so, I would have
// printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire. Were it
// within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch
// them on a spaceship directly into the sun.
//
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
I remember stuff like //Here be dragons! in the ircd source code...
 
I recall grepping the linux source code for "on fire" had some amusing comments.
 
Haha! the below rings a bell

//When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing
//Now, God only knows
Click to expand...

I created an Excel Macro which takes BIL of material information from our item master, deconstructs it then compares it with items sold in the last 5 months,even though the code works, I ended up making a mess of the code.

When i tried to change something on it, i couldn't believe it was me that wrote it. Sort of felt good in away.
 
I inherited some code to maintain at my first job that was coded by an interesting fellow who for some reason liked to name all his variable interesting names that while funny made it incredibly difficult to keep track of what variable was what. The names I can remember:

EnourmousScotsman
BeautifulBlond

There where many many more.
 
TBH , i actually added this one to my code , a few nights ago after about 6hours of intense coding
///<Summary> This might be redundant , cant remember what i coded this for , something to do with some mass balancing
/// but then again i can remember , hope fully i can get this to work again in the morning or at least sometime in the future.
/// useless code....
///</Summary>
Click to expand...

this was like 3am after to much coffee and to little sleep... so i ended up wiping the code and staring from scratch the next morning LOL
 
/*
* please go to task manager and make sure that node runs on one core
* before uncommenting this, else your PC won't respond for a few hours
*/
Click to expand...
That was me a few months ago trying to write all the lottery combinations into a mongoDB store. I eventually gave up :(
Out of interest, I started off with PHP and MySQL, needed to create the almost 14 million combinations, PHP timed out somewhere at the million, with a the MySQL DB at about 6gigs. Found Node to be way faster, but MongoDB just kept the data in memory, so I ended up running out of RAM in a minute or 2. Though I think there was something wrong that I was doing

The one below's from the S/O link that Denouncer posted, found it funny

Exception up = new Exception("Something is really wrong.");
throw up; //ha ha
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
// if one of you uncomment the below line again I will come fck you up

// I know it doesn't make sense, but if you swop these two lines it will p**s over

class survey // do you just not care about conventions or being a team player? Capitalise your class names ffs!

...enterprise systems. Seems like code comments are a way of venting.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X