Difference between revisions of "156: Commented"

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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m (Waldir moved page Commented to 156: Commented: Mass-moving pages to 'number: title' format, per discussion at explain xkcd:Community portal/Coordination#Page names)
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Revision as of 18:09, 7 August 2012

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commented.png

Image Text

Your IDE's colors may vary.

Description

The title of this comic refers to "Commenting", which is a way to add clarification to programming code. This is mostly done to make said code maintainable. Instead of all the dry programming statements, a coder can insert non-programming sections which clarify the way the programming statement, or combination of statements, is meant to work. This way, another coder that needs to update the code will have a better understanding of the structure and meaning of the code, which will allow him/her to implement the change faster. Also, comments are used to indicate changes to code, or comment out certain sections of code that went obsolete when revising the code into a newer version.

In the comic, Cueball is struck against BlackHat's Classhole attitude. This time, when asking a favor, BlackHat simply "comments out" Cueball's request by holding up two fingers in a skewed way. They then correspond to one way of adding comments to code, namely by two forward slashes ("//").

The Image Text refers to most modern Integrated Development Environments (or IDE's) that colorcode different sections in the code, such as variables, loops and nested statements, to add readability. Green, I suppose, is one way to color comments. Hence, the color may vary on which IDE you use (and offcourse, your own preferences set in that IDE).


comment.png add a comment! ⋅ comment.png add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅ Icons-mini-action refresh blue.gif refresh comments!

Discussion

The issue date on this comic isn't filled. Can someone fix that by adding the correct issue date? Rikthoff (talk) 17:17, 3 August 2012 (EDT)

In the first two panels, it looks like he's flicking the guy off. It's not until the third panel that we actually see the subversion. I'm reasonably certain that this is intentional. 108.162.238.117 02:34, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

In QtCreator, comments are dark blue. Kaa-ching (talk) 08:32, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm surprised that no-one has picked up on the fact that the text that is being commented out is multiple lines, but there is only one double slash, therefore only one of the lines can be commented out. For both to be commented, you'd need /* ... */ --141.101.99.218 09:03, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

No, it's a single line that's wrapped. The double slash works fine in that circumstance, in real code. — Kazvorpal (talk) 04:34, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
My thoughts about this is the slashes (fingers) are physical objects so therefor travel through time with the speaker. so this is effectively commenting out each word one by one as the sentence is spoken. 141.101.99.10 11:36, 21 September 2022 (UTC)
I think the prior comment has it. While 'life' may wrap the spoken line (in our POV, how it fits into the given comic-frame), it was not spoken (like the line may be typed) with a verbal linefeed-equivalent, and so the in-universe markup is applicable to the end.
The //s don't seem to apply retrospectively upon the initial words* and no reason to assume persistant upon arbitrary appearance of future words.
* - Some possibility that it works only from the POV of the symbol-caster, as seen in the final frame. Whilstsoever he positions the 'marks' in his own personal field-of-view, he gets a Head-Up-Display (which may normally display him supratitles, even without hue-changes?) altered accordingly, invisible to anyone not him, or viewing 'from-out-of-universe close-over-the-shoulder' like we do here.
But I could understand any number of rival visualisation tropes applying here, consistant with the one brief example we see depicted. (For one thing, it covers the 'embedded image', probably instantiated as a glyph within the 'environment' he views, that is the speaker and his speach-line.) 172.70.86.26 12:21, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

The title text may also be a reference to the "Your milage may vary." commonly found in the fine print in car commercials. 108.162.216.19 22:28, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

I believe he's commenting out Cueball entirely, thus ignoring him and therefore any and all statements he may make. Notice in the last panel that it's not Cueball's question alone that is color-coded, but Cueball as well. 108.162.238.8 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I also interpreted it as Black Hat explicitly painting his fingers green in order to utilize the comment power of the double slashes as opposed to them turning green due to the gesture.Flewk (talk) 10:52, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

So how did he then paint Cueball green? I think it is how Black Hat sees Cueball, i.e. he doesn't. Kynde (talk) 15:09, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Comments don't silence, they just switch the mode from 'interaction required' to metadata, which may even persist. Or...Black Hat may consider it a 'favor' to give Cueball's life color... Elvenivle (talk)

  1. I use python, so this is a comment. But, it's still possible to do with fingers! SilverMagpie (talk) 04:10, 24 May 2018 (UTC)
This is not python so your comment looks different here. And please NEVER edit former comments done by other people! --Dgbrt (talk) 15:37, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

// is the most common form of commenting I don't understand why there is so much discord over this in the comments. Lth3may0 (User talk:Lth3may0|talk]]) 8:56, 30 May 2023 (CEST)

comment succesfully ignored by the compiler! An user who has no account yet (talk) 08:37, 6 September 2023 (UTC)