cement

n 1: concrete pavement is sometimes referred to as cement; "they

stood on the gray cement beside the pool"

2: a building material that is a powder made of a mixture of

calcined limestone and clay; used with water and sand or

gravel to make concrete and mortar

3: something that hardens to act as adhesive material

4: any of various materials used by dentists to fill cavities

in teeth

5: a specialized bony substance covering the root of a tooth

[syn: {cementum}]

v 1: make fast as if with cement; "We cemented our friendship"

2: cover or coat with cement"

3: bind or join with cement

comment

(Or "remark") Explanatory text embedded in

program {source} (or less often data) intended to help human

readers understand it.

Code completely without comments is often hard to read, but

too heavily commented code isn't much better, especially if

the comments are not kept up-to-date with changes to the code.

Too much commenting may mean that the code is

over-complicated. A good rule is to comment everything that

needs it but write code that doesn't need much of it.

A particularly irksome form of over-commenting explains

exactly what each statement does, even when it is obvious to

any reasonably competant programmer, e.g.

/▫ Open the input file ▫/

infd ◦ open(input_file, O_RDONLY);

(1998-04-28)