Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-11-01:

"Ye had need tak care how ye dispute the existence of fairies, brownies and apparitions there; ye may as weel dispute the Gospel o' Sant Matthew." -- James Hogg, in 'The Wool Gatherer'.

http://www.archive.org/stream/talesandsketches01hoggrich]

(submitted to the mailing list by Jean Rogers)

[The line is spoken by a character named Barnaby.]

Happy Hallow'een and a blessed Samhain Eve, all!

Is this over-commenting / a sign that I didn't sleep well enough last night? I just wrote, in a C program:

    int     i;                     /* Ye olde generick loope counter (you  */
                                   /* do know that the 'Y' in "ye olde" is */  
                                   /* really supposed to be a _thorn_, so  */
                                   /* it's still pronounced "the old" not  */
                                   /* "yee old" right?  Well you do now.   */
                                   /* Not sure what most C compilers would */
                                   /* do with a non-ASCII character in a   */
                                   /* comment though.  But I digress ...)  */

I do seem to comment more extensively after trying to read almost anybody else's code, where I'm lucky to find comments describing a function's purpose, much less any explanation of its arguments or useful clues as to where I need to poke at it to add a feature. And I've been reading other people's code lately.

Obviously, this is code I'm planning to send to a bunch of other people ... (But while I'm posting -- do other compilers supply the __FILE__ and __DATE__ pre-defined macros, or is that just a gcc thing? I don't know what Windows users will compile this with.)