[mklim]

>So you feel that programmers are more inclined to treat the function name as an authority, as opposed to a comment. Is that an accurate? I'm curious what lead you to this conclusion.

I think this is a reasonable claim, even though as you've said there's nothing strictly enforcing this behavior. Function names are generally highlighted by the editor/IDE, and the developer is forced to stare at them and at least begin to type them out while calling them. They're brief and repeated over and over again in the source code. They're just harder to ignore. Comments on the other hand only appear once per comment, tend to be italicized and greyed out by IDEs, are generally at least one sentence in length and can span multiple paragraphs, and are never going to be directly referenced from within the code itself. It's still very possible to change a function without updating its name to suit its new purpose. But I know for me personally I'm much more prone to missing comments that I need to now delete or reword. I have to acknowledge the function name when I write code calling it or read code referencing it, but comments are just sort of there, hovering in the background. It's easier to read them once and then tune them out and forget that they're there.