[thrwaeasddsaf]

As always, there's a flipside..

I find code with lots of comments and "fluff" to be a drag to read and navigate and generally work with. I would rather have less to scroll to begin with, than have comments help me jump to a specific spot.

For example, I just replaced a well documented pair of functions that compute a checksum. The original implementation was about thirty lines, including comments and empty lines. My implementation uses a denser style and is just a single function with three lines in the body. I also removed a function argument to make the interface both simpler to use and also less general. KISS & YAGNI: if the more general version is ever needed, then it is trivial to add and make the simple version a wrapper for it. Until a real need shows up, I don't want it.

Of course my changes go way beyond comments, but this kind of thing can make an order-of-magnitude difference in code size (as measured in lines). I would rather work with 300 lines than 3000 lines, and the reduced need for jumping/scrolling around lessens the importance of navigation aids. Also, I find that the aids that are there anyways (function names, etc.) become more useful when there's no fluff to render them ineffective.

[drran]

Why not just use an obfuscator? It produces clean and compact code. You can disable mangling of names and reformat code after obfuscation using a formatter with your own set of rules. IMHO, it better to use tool designed just for that, instead of performing obfuscation by hands.

[thrwaeasddsaf]

I haven't seen a tool that can remove fluff and clean code. And I don't like formatters, because making the rules right is too complicated. I haven't seen a formatter that won't eventually mess up code that I carefully laid out.