Talk:Comment (computer programming)

message: This article was moved to comment (computing) and then moved back to comment (computer programming). The article then underwent some changes including: 
* addition of citations and references
* addition of new sections and content
* restructuring and refactoring of some of the preexisting content
Some items still outstanding:
* Article seems to assume "developers" are only ones who read source code (may need to rethink in light of open source)
* The existing comment (computing) article now needs considerable attention as it is now just a "stub" 
* The separate Comment out article may need to be merged into this one. dr.ef.tymac 05:11, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  article move 

message: So in other words you don't want to talk about the introduction wording that existed a week ago (ie, "In computer programming, a comment is a programming language construct that provides a mechanism for embedding information in source code that is (generally) ignored by compilers and interpreters but may be of use to people reading the source, or other programming tools that process the source such as documentation generators or source code management systems." and its ilk).  You would much rather talk about your wording. So lets not work on perfectly good wording, but start on some poorly written new wording. Perhaps in a month or two somebody else will come alone and we can start again on his/her new wording and lets not talk about the previous wording. I have better things to do than waste my time on helping to improve wording that is far inferior to what was already there. Derek farn 19:17, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Follow-up: I am happy to talk about *anything* here, as long as it is relevant to the article, and appropriate for this page. You might even remember me as the person who kept asking for more discussion. Anyway, It seemed reasonable to: (1) keep separate topics in separate threads; and (2) to first answer open questions (as a basic courtesy) before moving on to new topics, which was all I was asking for. dr.ef.tymac 20:33, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Edits by Sangwine: First off, the text in your parenthetical is *not* the text that prompted my modifications to the article intro to begin with. You appear to be citing an earlier revision that was changed by User:Sangwine and not by me. (then the article was suddenly re-moved and reverted to an older version, obliterating contributions by more than one editor, and then we ended up here...) dr.ef.tymac 22:04, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Readability: The text in your parenthetical does seem a bit wordy, especially for one sentence. It has a Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score of -19 (the higher the score, the more readable the text; some websites shoot for a 60 - 80 range), and a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 29. On that basis alone, I can see why someone might have thought it was a bit much. That's my take on it though, I don't speak for other editors. dr.ef.tymac 22:04, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Ownership of wording: Please note also, there is no "my" or "your" wording. Contributions to Wikipedia are just that. A review of the article intro indicates it retains a lot of the basis of previous edits, just with smaller sentences... dr.ef.tymac 22:20, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

text: I cannot make this any plainer to you: I did not originally change "your" intro sentence, User:Sangwine did, likely because it was very difficult to read. I don't know for sure because I am not him/her. The score is simply and neutral verifiable measure (for folks who don't like "nebulous and ambiguous" critiques, and who don't mind "wasting time" on improving readibility). As far as my own perspective, there are other issues besides that, but discussing them seems pointless without a two-way dialogue. dr.ef.tymac 03:18, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Dreftymac: Thanks for helping to improve the current article rather than trying to start from scratch.  I think an important distinction to make is that comments are primarily aimed at human readers while "program code" is aimed at computer "readers" of the source.  The idea of using colors to help readers distinguish between comments and code is a good one, but a picture is the wrong approach.  Why not include some code in a reduced font size (this may be hard to read, but I found the picture very hard to read) + colored to highlight various aspects. Derek farn 11:27, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  text from a week ago 

message: I have been operating under the view that (for purposes of this article) "Comment" is a compound definition with more than one sense: 1) the lexical conventions as defined in a formal language specification for indicating comments as sub-regions of source code; 2) the notes, reminders, docs and other linguistic artifacts indicated inside those subregions; and 3) any of various other recognized conventions (either present or future) that legitimately merit discussion in this specific article. So far, I haven't noticed anything in the article that is inconsistent with this view. Nor does this view seem unreasonable. Thoughts? Comments? dr.ef.tymac 17:22, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Follow-up: Definition 2) above was intended to include text-based cross-references to external binary resources (such as an audio file). This is an admittedly broader definition than some might expect, but seemed worth considering in light of some of the article content. dr.ef.tymac 23:06, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  refinements to definition of "comment" 

message: In the section on Style, the following statement should be supported by a reference: "On the other hand, the visibility of the second comment variant is much higher." According to whom? Even if this statement appears to the author(s) to be true, "visibility" isn't defined within the article.  -24.128.160.83 15:29, 15 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Styles: "visibility" 

message: Needs to be some differentiation between two ways these work: Either (a) delimiter can *only* is the first no-white-space and the whole line is a comment (ie oldskool BASIC); or (b) the the delimiter can also be used to the right of an executable line of code.
Also, it's not clear what's so special about the "End-of-line comment" - why does this deserve it's own section? Snori (talk) 08:16, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Line comments

message: Pursuant to the comments made under the Engineering and technology good articles review and de-listing. I have initiated some modifications to this article in order to address the relevant issues addressed there. Please consult the remarks at  and leave a comment here if you would like to modify the article as well, as it will help to ensure changes are compatible, complementary, and consistent with the goal of re-listing the article as a Good Article. Thanks. dr.ef.tymac (talk) 19:55, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Good Article review 

message: I'm missing the use of comments to add code in a forward compatible fashion, e. g. IE conditional comments. 78.52.101.8 (talk) 09:41, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Uses of comments 

message: How come the image of Java code contains various errors: frame.show(); should be inside the method, not outside of it. Also, according to Java conventions, the capitalization of HelloButton suggests it is a constructor, not a regular method. - Simeon (talk) 06:37, 9 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Java image 

message: I added a PL/I example to the language specific examples which was removed with the comment "PL/1 has nothing unique about it and is a rarely used language these days".  I won't get into an argument about how much PL/I is or isn't used other than to point out that it is an actively used and developed language.  As far as uniqueness, C, Java, and Transact-SQL have the same /*...*/format for comments, so if those three are all there, I believe PL/I should be too, especially since (I believe) it originated this format.  On the other hand many languages with distinct comment formats are not represented: ALGOL, COBOL, Pascal.... Peter Flass (talk) 04:36, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I think it will be very hard to come up with good criteria on which languages to include, considering there are so many out there. Rp (talk) 09:51, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text:  That's true.  How about including examples of each kind of comment format, which would mean the inclusion of COBOL, ALGOL, and Pascal.  Each example would list languages that use that format.  Thus there'd be C-type /*...*/ comments that are used by C (obviously), Java, PL/I, C++, etc. (though C++ that also uses // comments).  Then we'd have Pascal-type (*...*) comments (apparently also now {...} comments also used by maybe Modula-? languages, etc. Peter Flass (talk) 15:09, 29 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  PL/I 

message: This section just seems... useless. Someone possibly writing something offensive that someone might read and be offended by is not even remotely unique to code comments. I don't think anyone reading up on code comments would be shocked to find that some people might write swear words or disparaging comments.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.34.187.154 (talk) 22:01, 3 December 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Especially after fixing up someone's rats-nest coding at 2:00AM.Peter Flass (talk) 12:59, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I found that section distracting. The information should be moved to another article, or deleted outright. --Uncle Ed (talk) 11:26, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Offensive comments 

message: MySQL allows a pound sign to comment out a line of a SQL statement. 
Java coding standards do not (IIRC) require a Javadoc comment to begin each line with an asterisk. This makes it hard to revise comments, and comment that get out of date are useless.
It seems we're trying to make an alphabetical list of as many languages as we can think of, without regard to how popular they currently are. I'd rather see a section on block comments (with a list of which languages use each style), and a similar section on line comments.
Things like the double slash, the pound sign, the colon or semi-colon are common to a number of languages. DOS batch files and Basic both use REM. With DOS batch, you can also (ab)use a colon, effectively turning a line into a label (or goto target); it's quick and dirty, but it usually works. --Uncle Ed (talk) 11:26, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: MySQL Pound sign, Java coding standards and alphabetical order

message: The PHP sample section says, "Comments in PHP can be either in C++ style (both inline and block), or use hashes." and yet there is no example of the comment style of C++. If it is the same as "C", then the reference should be changed, although the "C" example only has one style of commenting illustrated, so the "(both inline and block)" reference would be unclear. 208.81.28.204 (talk) 13:57, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  PHP sample unclear 

message: I think this article would be better suited by a table and brief explanation, below, describing the various commenting styles rather than the extensive examples sections:
Below is a table of various commenting styles in different programming and markup languages. In all cases, the ellipsis is would be the commented code. 
Language        	Single-line comment	Multi-line comment	Doc strings
Python          	#...               	                  	"""..."""
AppleScript     	--...              	(*...*)           	
BASIC           	REM...             	                  	
Microsoft BASICs	'...               	                  	
C               	                   	/*...*/           	
C++             	//...              	                  	
Fortran IV      	C...               	                  	
ColdFusion      	                   	                  	
Fortran 90      	!...               	                  	
Haskell         	--...              	{-...-}           	
Java            	                   	/*...*/           	
OCaml           	                   	(*...*)           	
Perl            	#...               	?                 	
Ruby            	#...               	                  	
PHP             	#... or //...      	/*...*/           	
LaTeX           	%                  	                  	
SQL             	--...              	/*...*/           	
I will boldy perform the change in a couple days unless, of course, there are objections. Best! Scientific29 (talk) 03:40, 13 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Just found Comparison_of_programming_languages_(syntax)#Comments. Nevermind...Scientific29 (talk) 15:02, 13 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Replacing the "Examples" section with a table

message: The section on SQL suggests that the only standardised form of comment is the simple comment (<minus sign><minus sign>), and, additionally, implicitly suggests that T-SQL is unique in allowing bracketed comments. I've only been able to check the draft, but SQL:2008 (draft) allows (multiline) bracketed comments of the form "/* ... */" (the only RDBMSs I've used recently - apart from Sybase (T-SQL) - were all MySQL (5.0), which *does* allow bracketed comments, but this document suggests that Oracle (PL/SQL) has allowed multiline comments for some time - and I seem to recall it did many moons ago, when I last used Oracle).
I'm tempted to be bold, but I'd prefer it if someone with access to a final SQL spec could confirm bracketed comments made the final revision.
82.70.49.110 (talk) 11:25, 3 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  SQL 

message: Which language specification first introduced code comments?  I know they date back to the sixties with BCPL, COBOL, ALGOL 60 and BASIC.  So a better question might be, when did comments first appear in an assembly language..? John Vandenberg (chat) 07:53, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  History of the comment 

message: Comments in documents, most notably SGML comments, from which HTML comment and XML comment are derived, are an important part of the 'Comment' concept.  However this page is titles 'Comment (computer programming)', and comments in documents are not computer programming.  But, XSLT (and similar) is a functional programming language.  And Windows Script File & ColdFusion, already mentioned in this page, introduce SGML comments without explaining them properly.  Should 'document comments' be part of this page, or be a separate page.  If included in this page, the intro and/or title of this page needs to be more inclusive. John Vandenberg (chat) 08:28, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  SGML comments 

message: Have deleted the recently-added second example. While chock full of interesting stuff, it added nothing new about comments - and mentioning ASCII is "interesting"... Snori (talk) 19:53, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Fortran IV

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Write different comments of the system 103.221.246.206 (talk) 11:21, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Computer