Are comment headers and footers in your code really necessary? [closed]

Answer 1

The change history requirement in the header could be a left over from before they had a change history system in place. I have worked with systems where the comments were made manually and would create fake changes in the source control system!

Where I work currently copyright and change history are not required in code file headers or footers.

Answer 2

I work at a very large software corporation, with many many weird standards.

This is NOT one of them. We are not required to add any headers or footers to our source code. Copyright does not need to be stated on each class file. not to mention revision, which are handled by any source control management system available.

Answer 3

In the company I had my internship in we used these standard comment headers in all source files - boy they annoyed me. Everytime I had to read a new source-code file I had to scroll 1 or 2 screenlengths down because of all change-history each file had. In the 6 months I were there I never used the change-history at all, and never saw anyone who did.

My personal oppinion is that you shouldn't place stuff that you'll rarely need such a place. You need to have the change-history and stuff like that somewhere ofcourse, but it should be somewhere that you could look up in case you actually needed it. Maybe in the footer if you insist on embedding it into the source files?

Standard header comments are a pain, and should be VERY minimalistic or even better non-existing. Throw that huge ASCII-art down to the footer or into the readme, I don't care, but please, leave my header alone :)

You think google wouldv'e been a success if the first 800 pixels of your search result was populated with some huge google logo and copyright statements? :P

Answer 4

First, the change history is pointless, use your SCM for that.

A copyright statement is not strictly required (copyright is automatic)¹, but if you are publishing source then likely including it will be felt to be safer². The full licence statement would probably be better in a separate file and then referenced (this is what Boost does).

¹ Wikipedia has a reasonable summary, but you really need to take your own legal advice.

² Especially by lawyers playing it safe.

Answer 5

I work in a company and we do not require this. We have copyright for what we do by default, so it's just unnecessary text noise in a source file.

Change history can be useful but very limited. If you will attempt to make a record of each semicolon or operator you change, it's gonna get old very soon. Moreover, change history does not give you much details on what exactly a particular author has changed. It's rather who's been here and did something.

Answer 6

If this comes to corporate standards we haven't it at all. But in spite of this we adds copyright statement and contact data at begining of every file when this file is supposed to be distributed or supposed to be in use by other facilities. It helps in feedback gathering.