Paul,

>Though over the years some of my worst problems have been due to the presence of comments, rather than the lack of them. There's a tendency to believe the comments rather than the code & I've found that many programmers (not me, honest!), in the heat of the moment of fixing a bug, are likely to disregard updating the comments as well as fixing the bug.

Good answer. I've done quite a bit of work on OPC's (other people's code) and I do appreciate at least some header comments about the purpose of the program or function, the parameter specs (although they're usually easy enough to figure out), return values, and any revision history.

A simple comment here and there related to overall program flow and logic is also appreciated, along with detailed comments about any unusual logic or bug workarounds.

But I agree that nothing beats honing your abilities in reading the code and doing your own analysis of it.