Language for the ages

a.carlini at ntlworld.com wrote: Yes, but it does really just boil down to variable and function names - and it's a lot easier to look those up using a dictionary than it is to understand the full language needed to read comments. I've been there before with both Spanish and German code (neither a language that I know) and if the code's written well it's just a few minutes extra armed with a dictionary before it all makes sense, without really the need for the comments. Actually, I've seen a lot of pretty meaningless English comments over the years which only serve to mask bad code - I guess there's no substitute for programmers actually understanding the (coding) language which they're writing in (which seems to be a rarer thing as time goes one) I'm not saying yes you your question, but interesting observation: Personally I find that the layout and use of whitespace in higher-level langauges goes a long way toward making it understandable. It's still possible to quickly parse code with meaningless variable / function names providing it's well laid out. Of course, that's subject to the app/driver/whatever being sufficiently modular and of good design in the first place. I've seen some really nasty stuff over the years where it's next to impossible to understand :-) Actually, bad memories flooding back here! One of the worst situations I came across was a function of several thousand lines of code, doing many different jobs, and without a single comment. This in a high level language too. Variable names were human-readable (not just 'i' or whatever), but only valid contextually once within the several thousand lines of code (and not necessarily the first time they were used, either). Various statements never even got reached for all possible valid inputs, *and* the function was recursive for certain input states. Picking that apart was something of a challenge... cheers Jules