   does extensively commenting code..
  i was wondering,  does extensively commenting code create any sort of proformance hit/executable size difference?i'm sure if ther is it'd be small and well worth it for organizational purposes,  but i'm just curious   
  No. Why would it?   ;  Comments are always skipped by your building tools. Because of this, it does not matter how much comments you have as it will never change anything in the final binary.   ;  No it does not effect the code that is produced in size or execution speed.When code is compiled, it is put into one or more files that have the instructions for the computer to run.  In the compilation process the compiler skips/ignores any commented sections, and only analyzes and builds code that is not commented out.  Comments only exist in the source files, which themselves take up space, but it's only text.  Text takes up so little space on today's computers there is nothing to worry about, even if you had millions and millions of lines of comments.  The main space hog is media such as images, music and movies because those have to store much more data to represent the information.  In 32bit color depths in pictures, which is what a good percentage of image files are in now a days, it takes 4 bytes of information for a single pixel.  A byte for the alpha (transparency) value, and 1 byte for each red, green and blue.  Now imagine a 1024x768 desktop image.  That's 1024x768x4 which is 3,145,728 bytes, which is 3MB, plus a little bit more for the image header information.  Though with compression techniques you can cut down on file size.  With each character in a file at 1 byte, you could have 3 million characters in only 3MB, which of course is (usually) nothing in todays terms.I know this is a bit more than you asked for, but it's always fun/useful to learn more stuff :)  Plus hopefully it'll give you a bigger picture and a further understanding.   ;  Well, he didn't specify a language.Excessive comments can in fact slightly slow down certain interpreted languages (MaxScript used to be notorious for that, for example). However, compiled or JIT languages obviously won't be affected at all.   ;  I would have killed for the code I was working with today to have been heavily commented.So in other words. Comment your code (even if it the comments might become out of date later on). Oh, and update comments if you change how something works. You'll be my friend.With that said, I know how code works, I don't need explanations of syntax. But if you come up with an algorithm, or solution that you'd describe as clever or tricky, please let me know what the hell you're doing!!! Ahhhh legacy code.Everyone else has already answered your actual question. I'm apparently just wasting your time.   ;  It does in interpreted languages, where comments must be parsed. I don't know about latest versions, but in ActionScript, even variable lengths used to impact performance negatively.   ;  In theory, every additional character in your code yields slower compilation. If you care about that, you should:- not comment your code at all- avoid intendation- use short identifiers- write everything in a single line of code- realise by now that I am kidding;  If you have to 'extensively' comment your code, you're probably writing bad code. [grin]Your code should be pretty much self explanatory. You should never write a comment describing WHAT you are doing. The code should be readable and simple enough so you can easily see WHAT you are doing. Rather, comments should be used only to explain WHY you are doing some that is unintuitive. IT might be because of a bug you discovered, or some weird situation that is otherwise not obvious. This is the golden rule in my opinion [grin].   