[jabkobob]

The problem with his 'noob' example is not only that the comments are overly verbose, but also that his variable names are generic and totally useless. 'counter' and 'pos' or 'ref' are so generic that you always have to look at the whole code before you know what's going on. Rename the 'counter' variable to 'bytesProcessed', and rename the 'pos' variable to 'startOfBuffer', and use a variable named 'currentByte' to walk through the buffer... With descriptive variable names many comments become unnecessary.