Otaku, Cedric's weblog

I like to add comments for closing braces:

My first CS prof in college actually required this and would doc you if you didn't. I abhorred the practice at the time, but I do it now two if the block runs on for more than 20 lines (a screenish) or so.

Cooper, you're seeing another smell there: overly long blocks. As Mike points out, commenting closing braces is nearly always the sign of a method that's too long. (Though complicated mathematical algorithims may well be a different kettle of fish).

One thing I do with my Eclipse comment configuration is put the words "TODO" in - that way, it shows up in the various lists of tasks.

I think your comment is much better than the orginal article, that one just contain common practice with available everywhere. But your comment is really your idea and experience, I like this much more~

>>Cooper, you're seeing another smell there: overly long blocks. As Mike points out, commenting closing braces is nearly always the sign of a method that's too long. (Though complicated mathematical algorithims may well be a different kettle of fish).

You know, I think that is really an oversimplification, and not necessarily true. Frankly, if you have a 15 or 20 step proceedure, I would rather see it laid out in one method where it is clear what you are doing. Personally, I think there is a lot of "method propogation" that goes on in the name of this that makes code much harder to follow.

Secondly, 20 lines is easy to hit when you are looking at code at my office in gnu style.

public void foo()
{
for
{
switch()
{
case 0:
call();
breal;
case 1:
call2();
break;
case 2:
if
{
call();
}
else
{
call();
}
break;
default:
call();
}
}

}

Again, a pretty short and mostly control structures, but still long enough that by the end of the method, you might be wondering where the for() block ends.

Hmmm you want some help with yours comments, just use Commentator: http://www.cenqua.com/commentator/ ;-)

Well, I never know who uses UBB-ish stuff and who used HTML :P The line count in the above is all I really cared about though, so I think it still gets the point across.

As a general rule I always try to stay away from closing-brace comments. Comments tend to fall out of sync pretty quickly, even more so when they are on a closing brace, and even more so when they are on a closing brace of a bigger code block.

I have been tricked more than once by comments that told me I was looking at the closing brace of an "if (cond)" when really it was the end of a while loop with a different condition.

DRY totally applies in this situation especially when even the tools can't help you catch the problem.

Cedric,

The Eclipse template is a very good idea.

I don't like to put comments in the closing brace because I think it's not necessary when I have only a few lines of code between braces and if I have a lot of code between the braces I do some refactoring to resolve the problem.

I really appreciate to comment blocks of code, but in the last few months I have used methods with descriptive names despite block comments (//) and my experience have been very nice.

Sample:

public void foo() {
// Reads file lines
File f = new File(path);
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(f));
String line;
StringBuffer lines=new StringBuffer();
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
lines.append(line);
}
// ...
}

The above code changes to:

public void foo() {
String lines = readFileLines();
// ...
}
private String readFileLines() {
File f = new File(path);
BufferedReader reader =
new BufferedReader(new FileReader(f));
String line;
StringBuffer lines=new StringBuffer();
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
lines.append(line);
}
return lines.toString();
}

I agree with Mr. Watkins. If you need to comment your closing braces, then you have a problem with your code. I use to follow this practice in my C days but you shouldn't need it in an OO Java application except possibly in some unusual (read: rare) algorithms.

I think people comment too much. That's right, too much. Why do you comment? Because the code is too messy/complicated. Instead of wasting time writing comments to explain just make your code better.

Unfortunately I think it's one of those things where if you comment people automatically assume you're doing a good thing.

"I like to add comments for closing braces"

As many people already said, my experience says, that this is a pretty bad practice that does not live with time and does not support team development.

I have seen this kind of practice with overly long and convoluted code..and after a year it was a mix of commented and uncommented brace.

Such comments clutter the code a lot. With today's IDE you get brace highlighting for free you don't need to comment that, otherwise you may well invent a language with named blocks.

I have listen to my first mentor that taught me to write methods with no more than 20-30 LOC

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