Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.
Ralph Johnson

Block Comment

We all know what a block comment is, sometimes we use it to comment a bunch of lines of code. And sometimes we might want those lines of code to be uncommented and commented again. In a traditional way, we need to make two modifications each time, at the beginning and at the end of block comment symbol.

For example:

usual_code();

sometimes_unused();
sometimes_unused_too();

another_code();

If we want to comment some lines:

usual_code();
/*
sometimes_unused();
sometimes_unused_too();
*/
another_code();

We modified two spots. Now, I prefer to do just one modification each “toggle” (comment-uncomment switch), so I use this:

usual_code();
/* Some description
*/
sometimes_unused();
sometimes_unused_too();
/**/
another_code();

To comment them:

usual_code();
/* Some description
     <-- only need to delete this part, one spot
sometimes_unused();
sometimes_unused_too();
/**/
another_code();

More efficient. IMHO.

May 25th, 2011 Programming Tags: , , 1 Comment 271 views