Question

We all know that commenting our code is an important part of coding style for making our code understandable to the next person who comes along, or even ourselves in 6 months or so.

However, sometimes a comment just doesn’t cut the mustard. I’m not talking about obvious jokes or vented frustraton, I’m talking about comments that appear to be making an attempt at explanation, but do it so poorly they might as well not be there. Comments that are too short, are too cryptic, or are just plain wrong.

As a cautonary tale, could you share something you’ve seen that was really just that bad, and if it’s not obvious, show the code it was referring to and point out what’s wrong with it? What should have gone in there instead?

See also:

• When NOT to comment your code
• How do you like your comments? (Best Practices)
• What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered?

Answer 1

Just the typical Comp Sci 101 type comments:

$i = 0; //set i to 0  $i++; //use sneaky trick to add 1 to i!  if ($i==$j) { // I made sure to use == rather than = here to avoid a bug 

That sort of thing.