moment

n 1: a particular point in time; "the moment he arrived the party

began" [syn: {minute}, {second}, {instant}]

2: an indefinitely short time; "wait just a moment"; "it only

takes a minute"; "in just a bit" [syn: {minute}, {second},

{bit}]

3: at this time; "the disappointments of the here and now";

"she is studying at the moment" [syn: {here and now}, {present

moment}]

4: having important effects or influence; "decisions of great

consequence are made by the president himself"; "virtue is

of more moment that security" [syn: {consequence}, {import}]

[ant: {inconsequence}]

5: the moment of a couple is the product of its force and the

distance between its opposing forces

6: the n-th moment of a distribution is the expected value of

the n-th power of the deviations from a fixed value

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)