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Comment by h2s | Hacker News Reader

Nah I didn't think that at all, it was clear from the way you said "minimal commenting". I just have an axe to grind when it comes to comments of the form

    // assign the integer value 10 to the variable x
    x = 10

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What's really annoying is that most of the time you see this kind of comment there is no explanation why 10 was chosen.

And that's what comments really need to do: tell 'why.'

http://xkcd.com/221/

That's why you should use constants. Still self documenting without the need for comments (usually).

    const TEN = 12;

    #define true false

In our embedded systems class we were required to define all of our constants, just to add another level of description to operations. It definitely helped to navigate spaghetti code.

At least it's better than:

    // set the variable x to 10
    x = 12;

  sFile = "filename.xml";

then later

  sFile = File.ReadAllText("filename.xml");

I think you've forgotten a leading zero ;)

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