However, I'm also a GhostDoc fan: http://submain.com/products/ghostdoc.aspx So I appreciate some people consider me to be inherently evil/lazy.
However, I'm also a GhostDoc fan: http://submain.com/products/ghostdoc.aspx So I appreciate some people consider me to be inherently evil/lazy.
a) Don't write them in the first place. b) Don't keep them up to date (as to3m mentioned, it is utterly ridiculous when you need to update a comment and then need to reflow every following sentence. Many developers will simply not do it).
Additionally another counterpoint seems to be "my comments are short anyways", which would make me question why comment in the first place? In most cases where I've seen short comments, they were completely unnecessary redundant restating of exactly what the code already tells you.
The comments that really add real value don't try to pseudo-code the code, but instead tell you the why of the code. It is extremely hard to describe why in 80 characters or less.
Before I used Comment Reflower, I used one of the example VBA macros that comes with Visual Studio. It was rather slow, and somewhat buggy (you're much, much better of with Comment Reflower) but it would - usually - word wrap your comments without making too much of a mess. But I noticed my comments improving in quality pretty much the moment I started using it, because finally I could say as much as needed to be said without it being a bother to keep things nicely formatted, or having to even think about the effort of keeping it up to date later.
Manual word wrapping reminds me of the days before copy and paste and undo, which (due to my age) thankfully didn't last all that long for me. I personally do not want ever to go back to that time, though I suppose for some the idea might seem attractively quaint ;)