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RE: Re: Re st: RE: open source


From   "Nick Cox" <[email protected]>
To   <[email protected]>
Subject   RE: Re: Re st: RE: open source
Date   Tue, 7 Sep 2004 11:18:29 +0100

I just did some timings on a trivial program 
wrapped around 

	di 42 

and the same program with 10,000 comment lines 

	* a comment 

added. The time taken by the two programs
is indistinguishable. Running the two 10,000
times each produced the interesting result 
that the program with comments ran faster... 
I don't believe this, but I do assert that 
-- whatever Bill said, and I'd like to hear 
the context -- worries about 
speed should _not_, usually, inhibit users from 
adding comments to taste. That doesn't rule 
out minor but possibly useful tricks such 
as not putting comments within loops, but 
outside loops. (Thinks: I probably did that 
somewhere....) 

Nick 
[email protected] 

David Airey
 
> Yes, I remember that too. I think it was the case that comments after 
> the program did not slow it down, because nothing was 
> interpreted after 
> end. I think perhaps this means the run copy could be up top and the 
> commented (documented) version down below or something like 
> that. There 
> are numerous texts (one good one by Microsoft) on the value of code 
> documentation. For the in house purposes of StataCorp, their level of 
> ado documentation must be adequate, otherwise they would be 
> inefficiently having to figure out the code and the fix. My guess is 
> that documentation would serve the user community more than StataCorp 
> by improving external programming skills. But, that's why we 
> pay for a product. Maybe the structure of the ado code should have this 
> formalized.
 

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