[foxboro] A Comment about comments

Hello, All
This "discovery" may be news to some or a reminder for others...
Last Friday I had to troubleshoot code written by someone else.  The code
was 28 pages long and had a missing ENDIF somewhere.  A real man can find a
missing ENDIF just by reading through the code, right?  ("Piece of cake", I
thought--for about an hour.)  I eventually resorted to the beginner's method
of commenting out sections of code to isolate the error.

The code used a lot of the Pascal-style "curly brace" comment delimiters --
{ like this }.  So, I also used them to isolate sections of code.  I blocked
out the top half of the code and did not find the error.  I kept dividing up
the bottom half until there was nothing left to divide.  So, I began again.
This time, I blocked out the bottom half first and still did not find it.
Where else could it be?  

About that time, I noticed that errors were showing up INSIDE THE AREA I HAD
COMMENTED OUT.  WTF? How can that happen?  I replaced my Pascal-style
comment delimiters with C-style delimiters -- /* like this */.  I
immediately got the expected results.  

It seems that not all comments are invisible to the compiler.  So, why do
Pascal-style comment delimiters seem to kind-of, sort-of usually almost
always work?  Who knows?  I just won't use them for troubleshooting any
more.


Chuck Jones
Refinery Automation Technologist
Tate & Lyle -- Lafayette South Plant
765.477.5324 - Office  | 877.536.9219 - Pager

"What I used to know, I forgot."
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