December 2006
Intermediate to advanced
610 pages
22h 58m
English
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Chapter 5: A Passing Comment
Mull It Over
How might the need for and the content of comments differ in the following types of code:
Low-level assembly language (machine code)
Shell scripts
A single-file test harness
A large C/C++ project
Assembly language is less expressive, providing fewer opportunities for self-documenting code. Therefore, you’d expect more comments in assembly code, and you’d expect those comments to be at a much lower level than comments in other languages—assembly language comments generally would explain how as well as why.
There isn’t an enormous a difference between the remaining three. Shell scripts can be quite hard to read back; they are proto-Perl in this respect. Careful commenting helps. You’re more likely to use literate ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.