Most gratuitous comments

[Albert van der Horst]

In article <546d7505$0$12899$c3e8da3$5496439d at news.astraweb.com>,
Steven D'Aprano  <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>And the award for the most gratuitous comments before an import goes to
>one of my (former) workmates, who wrote this piece of code:
>
># Used for base64-decoding.
>import base64
># Used for ungzipping.
>import gzip

The comment lines contain genuine information. The program is
decoding or gunzipping. (And apparently not doing the encoding part)

This information may have been better conveyed by
"
from base64 import base64-decode
from gzip import gunzip
"
but anyway.

Also the comment may be misleading, but I think not.

If there are mysterious names for packages, the comment may be
actually useful.
"
# Auxiliary for the reverse recursion to calculate
# Chebychev coefficients.
import courseware-2014-ch11
"

A professor who demands from students that every import is documented
is IMO not to blame.
In a company's coding convention ... I've seen a lot of things there
that make a lot less sense.

>--
>Steven
-- 
Albert van der Horst, UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- being exponential -- ultimately falters.
albert at spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst