re: Re: Re st: RE: open source

[David Airey <david.airey@vanderbilt.edu>]

> As for commenting ado code, what I would like to see is code that I, 
> as a
> programmer, can sit down, read, and learn from, without having to 
> engage
> in excessive detective work.  I did my formal training in programming 
> an
> embarrassing number of years ago (clue - I subsequently albeit briefly 
> had
> arpanet privileges), but I doubt the principles of documenting code 
> have
> changed an awful lot since then.  I have a vague memory of Bill Gould
> writing somewhere that lots of comments slow down the execution of 
> code,
> but I would hope there would be ways around this in practice.

Yes, I remember that too. I think it was the case that comments after 
the program did not slow it down, because nothing was interpreted after 
end. I think perhaps this means the run copy could be up top and the 
commented (documented) version down below or something like that. There 
are numerous texts (one good one by Microsoft) on the value of code 
documentation. For the in house purposes of StataCorp, their level of 
ado documentation must be adequate, otherwise they would be 
inefficiently having to figure out the code and the fix. My guess is 
that documentation would serve the user community more than StataCorp 
by improving external programming skills. But, that's why we pay for a 
product. Maybe the structure of the ado code should have this 
formalized.

-Dave

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